Initial commit of ebook 79371 filesHEADmain

1 files changed, 4950 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/79371-0.txt b/79371-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f036207
--- /dev/null
+++ b/79371-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4950 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79371 ***
+
+
+
+
+                           SAINT MUNGO’S CITY
+
+                                A Novel
+
+                            BY SARAH TYTLER
+
+         AUTHOR OF ‘THE BRIDE’S PASS,’ ‘WHAT SHE CAME THROUGH,’
+                      ‘BEAUTY AND THE BEAST,’ ETC.
+
+                        [Illustration: colophon]
+
+                            IN THREE VOLUMES
+                                VOL. I.
+
+                                 London
+                     CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY
+                                  1884
+                        [_All rights reserved_]
+
+
+
+
+                          SAINT MUNGO’S CITY.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+YOUNG MACKINNON’S MARRIAGE CONTRACT.
+
+
+Nearly thirty years ago, three highly-respectable ‘single ladies,’
+sisters, of the name of Mackinnon, the youngest of them already turned
+forty, the eldest over fifty, and showing decided tokens of what had
+been from the beginning a sort of ready-made old-maidishness, dwelt in
+what was still a commodious house in one of the old squares of Glasgow.
+It was a region which had fallen down in the world, since the days when
+its substantial houses--their line broken here and there by low-browed,
+covered-in ‘pends’--were occupied by more than one of the ‘Tobacco
+Lords’--the ancient autocrats of the West, sprouts from the great
+Highland houses who had pocketed their pride and stooped to prosecute
+trade in St. Mungo’s city instead of levying blackmail on the Lowland
+borders. These adventurous spirits had amassed great fortunes, and had
+strutted on the ‘plainstanes’ in their huge wigs and scarlet cloaks, as
+haughtily as in the days of their youth they had climbed their native
+braes in bonnets and kilts. Such magnates had long passed away. The tide
+of trade and fashion had altered more than once in the interval since
+sugar had got the better of tobacco, and cotton had rivalled sugar, and
+iron distanced cotton.
+
+As for the cotton and iron lords, they were no longer content with
+gloomy houses near the old College and the Cathedral, from which the
+dweller could patronize learning and hold intercourse with the
+professors and clergy--ignoring their comparative poverty because they,
+too, were of gentle birth, while book-knowledge has always had its value
+in Scotland. Far less were the modern traders satisfied with country
+houses by the Kelvin or down near the Broomielaw. Glasgow was spreading
+out north and south, and east and west. The old houses, which had become
+centres of a great population, instead of standing on the outskirts of a
+town, were constantly passing into lower hands or changing their
+character. The buildings were occupied by shopkeepers and warehousemen,
+or let out in lodgings, or, after sustaining a gutting-out process,
+flourishing anew as shops, where in former days no shops, however
+select, had broken in upon the genteel retirement of ‘family mansions.’
+
+Like houses, like people; many of the proud, prosperous old families had
+fallen from their high estate, and stood on an inferior footing, forced
+to yield in wealth and influence to new men coming to the front in new
+branches of industry--men frequently not drawn from the gentler ranks,
+either of the Highlands or Lowlands, who had been ‘hands’ before they
+were ‘heads,’ and, along with the sterling qualities which had raised
+their owners, were apt to retain much of the original clay with which
+they had been clogged.
+
+The class which was superseded had only the pride of their superior
+antiquity and gentility to console them, and naturally clung tenaciously
+and not very amiably to these antecedents. The Miss Mackinnons were come
+of the outstripped, borne-down rulers of the past. Their father had been
+a man in a better position than the one they filled. Their grandfather
+had been far before their father. As for their great-grandfather, ‘a’
+Glasgy,’ as Miss Janet was wont to say, ‘trim’led at the wag o’ his
+finger.’ Unfortunately, his descendants had little more than his memory
+to plume themselves upon.
+
+But it seemed as if the fortunes of the Mackinnons were about to
+revive--not in the persons of the ladies, whose prospects of
+advantageous matrimonial alliances, never great, were slipping slowly
+but surely from the reluctant women’s grasp--but in the case of their
+eldest nephew, the head of their branch of the family. Gavin Mackinnon
+was about to marry an heiress in her own right--not such an heiress as a
+Glasgow Mackinnon might once have aspired to--but a lass whose family
+was not without drawbacks and little mortifying objections, which the
+ladies, if not their nephew, swallowed with a manifest effort of
+complacence.
+
+Still, here was an undoubted heiress who had succeeded through her
+mother to a small landed property, the worth of which was increased
+tenfold by calico-printing and dye-works built on the land, also the
+property of Miss Craig, when such works had come into repute as sources
+of trade and wealth that would hold their own against the cotton
+industries thus supplemented.
+
+No Mackinnon had married a bride with so promising a patrimony for the
+last two generations. Certainly the trumpeters of the family recoiled a
+little from the obligation of their nephew to take up calico-printing
+and dying as a calling, which was something widely different from
+possessing estates in Virginia, that furnished broad Scotland, and
+England to boot, with wholesale supplies of the crop of the country.
+
+In addition, the elder ladies could have wished that Miss Craig had been
+able to claim more commercially aristocratic kindred; nevertheless, she
+and her dowry were by no means to be despised. ‘There would be plenty of
+the cotton and iron dirt’--Miss Janet was guilty of indicating the
+_nouveaux riches_ in these terms--‘who, for all their bragging that they
+were rolling in wealth, would jump fast enough at Maggie Craig, with her
+cash and Drysdale--her grand-uncle-by-marriage’s auld farm-house,
+print-factory, and dye-vats.’
+
+It was more of a recommendation than the reverse to the Mackinnons, that
+Miss Craig, who had been sent home from India for her education, had few
+relations in this country, and was so far dependent on the good offices
+of the Glasgow kinswoman of her future husband. It was a matter of
+resignation, to say the least, to these fairly humane and
+well-intentioned persons, that Miss Craig’s mother, from whom she
+inherited her property, had died when she was an infant, and that her
+father had married again since she left India. It would have been a
+thousand pities for her to return there to her strange step-mother,
+especially when the tenant to whom the calico-printing works were let,
+who had made a good thing out of them, was retiring at the end of his
+lease on a competence, leaving the business with the works to a
+successor, who might or might not be the husband of the owner.
+
+The Craigs were nobodies; and the Drysdales who were before them at
+Drysdale Haugh were little better, ‘farming bodies’ of a homely kind,
+though the land had been their own; while calico-printing and dyeing had
+not yet reached such a magnitude as to elevate calico-printers and dyers
+to the rank that the tobacco-traders had held--they were hardly on a
+level with cotton and iron manufacturers.
+
+But when Gavin Mackinnon turned up, crossed Miss Craig’s path, proposed
+for her, and on her acceptance of his hand boldly undertook to become a
+printer and dyer on his own account, his aunts were not so destitute of
+the shrewdness of a trading population as to fail to hail the windfall
+which had come to the family, and the staff which had been put into
+Gavin’s not too capable hand.
+
+It was a pleasure to the gradually aging women that the marriage should
+take place in their house. In addition to the lively interest which
+women in general find in all that belongs to a wedding, intensified to
+the highest pitch of excitement when the actors by proxy are past their
+grand climacteric and have lost the sanguine expectation of becoming
+brides themselves, the Miss Mackinnons had a natural liking, seldom
+gratified, for dispensing counsel, and ordering and presiding in matters
+of consequence.
+
+They were all three tall, stout women, rather imposing-looking in their
+very plainness. It was an advantage to the two elder sisters that they
+assumed the matronly style in dress which ought to have been theirs, had
+fortune been kinder, and men more solicitous of their favour. They wore,
+if not caps, at least a sufficient quantity of lace disposed about
+their heads to shade what was gaunt or heavy. Pelerines and huge falling
+collars had gone out for young women, but older people still indulged in
+them, and they were not without a certain dignity which suited large
+proportions. The third sister, Miss Bethia (pronounced with the accent
+on the ‘i’) did herself less justice. She put on gowns of gayer colours
+and flimsier materials, and arranged her unsheltered hair in a much more
+youthful fashion of elaborate plaits and braids.
+
+Miss Mackinnon was developing deafness which she declined absolutely to
+acknowledge, and the greater part of her time was spent in clearing up
+the misconceptions--the inevitable growth of habitually hearing and
+speaking at cross purposes. She had grown both tart and stupid under the
+process, otherwise she would not have been less intelligent and
+agreeable than her sisters, which, perhaps, was not saying much, for
+the Miss Mackinnons had been brought up under desperately narrowing
+influences and with overwhelming prejudices. Miss Janet had come to the
+front as the result of Miss Mackinnon’s deafness; she was left to lay
+down the law, while her long tongue and restless energy kept her from
+granting her victim a moment’s respite.
+
+Miss Bethia represented the accomplishments of the ladies. She was
+fondly believed to be one of the best piano-players in Glasgow, which
+meant that she thundered through half-forgotten pieces with stunning din
+and astounding celerity, and played reels with more spirit than
+delicacy. In spite of the family’s income, she worked indefatigably for
+pleasure, and at considerable cost, in wools and silks, heaping up
+trophies only too gorgeous in the shape of cushions and stools and
+screens, in the otherwise faded and antiquated drawing-room. She had a
+simper hovering about her large mouth which was absent from her
+sisters’ faces, and seemed to say that in spite of Miss Bethia’s
+ponderous nose, light blinking eyes, with barely visible eye-lashes, and
+tow-like hair, much on the pattern of the other members of the family,
+she laboured under the delusion that she was the beauty no less than the
+genius of her race. It is hardly necessary to say that Miss Bethia was
+the most foolish of the sisterhood.
+
+There was a redeeming feature in the Miss Mackinnons’ characters which
+did something to make up for their intolerable conceit and tendency to
+constitute themselves and their opinions the centre of the universe,
+before which all mankind was to bow. They were strongly attached to each
+other. None deferred more loyally to Miss Mackinnon than did Miss Janet
+and Miss Bethia; a fond mother could hardly have been prouder of a
+cherished daughter’s performances than were the elder sisters of the
+younger’s prowess on the ‘piany’ and in fancy-work.
+
+One of the peculiarities of the female Mackinnon mind was that it
+scorned any attempt in Scotch people to speak ‘high English.’ As the
+ladies’ voices were naturally loud, and they had accustomed themselves
+to speak still more loudly to suit Miss Mackinnon’s infirmities, the
+effect of their homely Scotch shouted to each other or to any visitor
+was decidedly startling to a new-comer. Another thing the sisters could
+not abide was a silly pretence at polished instead of plain manners.
+Such weak copying of their neighbours, or yielding to changes which were
+no improvements, were for ‘the cotton and iron dirt.’ Such trifles were
+far beneath the attention of the Mackinnons. These favoured mortals
+needed no artificial props. The family’s claims to precedence were so
+unanswerable that a Mackinnon might do exactly as he or she liked,
+within the bounds of the moral law, for the maiden representatives of
+the house were respectable Christians and staunch Presbyterians, assured
+that the name would grace any speech or action, and confer, not derive,
+lustre from it.
+
+Only a small moiety of the world took the Miss Mackinnons at their own
+estimation, and the moiety was ever decreasing. Strange to say, Maggie
+Craig, a simple yet aspiring girl, was among the worshippers at the
+nearly deserted shrine. These absurd elderly women contrived to throw
+dust in her young eyes. Her chief inducement to marry Gavin Mackinnon
+was that he was the first man who had made her an offer, and that he was
+big--big in various ways--in speech as well as in bodily inches, and so
+filled a certain space in her world. But her next reason was that in
+marrying him she would enter into one of the oldest and best Glasgow
+families, which to Maggie signified as much as if she had referred to
+one of the patriarchal houses of ancient Rome, and that she might
+thenceforth hold up her head in the light of being closely allied to the
+unapproachable cream of the inhabitants of her father’s native city.
+
+Therefore the bride-elect was highly gratified instead of being
+intensely bored by the invitation from her future husband’s aunts to
+make their house her home, and be married from it, rather than from the
+house of a business correspondent of her father’s or of a
+school-companion of her own, nearly all the choice she could command.
+
+Mr. Craig had sent home a formal consent to the marriage. It was little
+more than a form, since Maggie was of age and could please herself. He
+dimly remembered the Mackinnons as something beyond the common and above
+his mark when he left Scotland. He had not known anything of them in
+later days so as to modify his opinion. At the same time, his parental
+interest in Maggie, and his impression that she was doing well for
+herself, did not go the length of tempting him to return before his
+time. He had younger children, who, as they had never been separated
+from him, had eclipsed the first-born in his affections, and he was at
+once easy-going and slow to be moved from the plans of his whole life.
+He left Maggie to her own discretion, and trusted her to her new
+friends. He would come home, if he lived, at the date he had originally
+fixed.
+
+It was the night before the wedding--a frosty winter night, which caused
+a slight shudder in the minds of stay-at-home people at the thought of
+the railway journey to London--the sum-total of the bridal tour. A jaunt
+to London in winter, and to the Highlands or Ireland in summer, were the
+stereotyped wedding-trips which had always floated dimly before the Miss
+Mackinnons’ imaginations; and it is needless to say the sisters had
+imposed their standard on the younger generation by sheer strength of
+will and loudness of tongue. Gavin Mackinnon was something of sounding
+brass himself, but he was quiet and yielding compared to the redoubtable
+aunts. Maggie was a cipher in their hands in the meantime.
+
+In spite of what might have been supposed to be the Miss Mackinnons’
+skill and experience as tacticians in a general way, they had as a
+matter of course not been familiar with marriages. The grey house in the
+weather-beaten, smoke-darkened square was in the greatest disorder.
+There was not a room clear of bride’s-cake, or white gloves--‘livery,’
+the elder ladies called them--or new gowns, or travelling trunks. There
+was hardly a place in which to receive the two lawyers who came for the
+important purpose of reading and getting the signatures to the marriage
+contract. The Miss Mackinnons had talked so much for the last ten days
+that they were not fit for anything else. The bridegroom, finding it
+less trouble to agree than to contradict, had acquiesced accordingly--in
+spite of his pompousness. Maggie was only occupied in considering how
+soon she would be a Mackinnon, with all the privileges of the race.
+
+The marriage settlement, which was as necessary for the dignity of the
+family as for the safety of Miss Craig, was left to take care of itself
+or to be concocted by the aunts. Luckily they were perfectly honest, and
+had no thought of taking advantage of their new relative. Luckily, too,
+for the sense and reason of the document, Miss Craig’s lawyer was on the
+spot, and had been invited to join another member of the profession--the
+Mackinnon family lawyer--in drawing up the deed. Miss Janet was
+persuaded that none of the preparations would prosper unless she were,
+as she said, ‘at the heels of them.’ But she was now entertaining a
+visitor who had come on a call of congratulation and inspection.
+
+Miss Carstairs was a little woman, a contemporary and old friend of the
+Miss Mackinnons--one who had come within the charmed circle of old
+Glasgow. She now sat coolly and contentedly in the middle of the
+confusion, where old silver dishes and ‘dead-fine’ table linen, hunted
+out of ‘presses’ to do honour to the occasion, lay about among
+railway-rugs, leather straps and time-tables on the little ebony tables
+and bamboo chintz-covered chairs and couches of the drawing-room. The
+dining-room, with its heavy mahogany and horse-hair furniture, and fine
+old punch-bowl below the sideboard, pointing back to the days when
+Glasgow punch had been famous, was given up, as a place of superior
+gravity and masculine simplicity, to the lawyers with their pen and ink,
+and the young couple who were to profit by these appliances.
+
+‘Our marriage settlements,’ said Miss Janet in her powerful voice to her
+crony, as if she and her sisters had been married two or three times
+over, ‘were aye made siccar, though in the making they covered ever so
+many pages of parchment. My great-grandfather’s was, like his will, as
+big as a sma’ book. He married a Fenton--Jean Fenton--and it is through
+her me and my sisters have an interest in Strathdivie--that is, if ever
+the Fentons of Strathdivie fail, we’ll come in for our share as heirs
+female through my great-grandmother, Jean Fenton. Oo aye, this
+settlement between my nephew Gauvin and Miss Craig is but a flea-bite
+compared to our former settlements. But that is no reason it should not
+be made richt and ticht, with a lawyer on our side, Dauvit Milne--we’ve
+always employed that firm--and a lawyer on hers, new graith [growth],
+but a decent enough man, I believe, a Mr. Dalgleish. Do you ken him,
+Miss Carstairs?’
+
+‘I should think so,’ said Miss Carstairs, a little drily; ‘you’ve
+forgotten, Miss Janet, he married my niece Tina. They’ve a place in the
+Highlands, where I stayed three weeks with them last summer.’
+
+Miss Janet did not trouble herself to apologize for what might have been
+a slip of the tongue; on the contrary, she rushed upon a fresh offence.
+‘A place in the Hielants, and he a writer body that lives by pen and
+ink, and cannot date back two generations!’ she exclaimed, in a high,
+protesting key. ‘After that Dauvit Milne may have his London mansion,
+and his shooting-box in the Sooth.’ The irony was more plain than
+gracious; but graciousness was not a quality in which Miss Janet
+Mackinnon excelled. ‘Weel,’ she added with emphasis, after a pause, as
+if the world’s verdict hung on her sentence, ‘I’ve nothing particular to
+say against it--save that “dockens will aye be waggin’,”’ she ended with
+admirable candour.
+
+Miss Carstairs gave an indignant sniff, but she knew Miss Janet too
+well to resent her unconscionable rudeness. Besides, it was the
+Dalgleishes who were stigmatized as ‘dockens.’ Miss Carstairs was as
+well descended as any Mackinnon of them, and could afford to overlook
+the sneer.
+
+‘It was touch-and-go with that will,’ remarked the eldest Miss
+Mackinnon, with her usual irrelevancy, for she had caught only stray
+fragments of the conversation. ‘If she had died an hour or twa suner,
+our Miss Craig would have lost every penny. It would have been maist
+unnatural that she should not have profited by her mother’s succession,
+but auld Drysdale never mentioned heirs. He was a hot-headed stubborn
+man, and though he had a great work with Beenie Pryde, he never liked
+Jock Craig. It was not with the uncle’s will that the niece made the
+marriage. But, as I said, it was a mercy she died when she did, though
+I’ve heard tell that if she had so much as given a pech or sech [groan
+or sigh] after his breath was out, the property would have been hers,
+and would have come in the course of nature, as it has done, to her
+dochter, her heiress.’
+
+‘She’s speaking of how Miss Craig’s mother came into her inheritance,’
+Miss Janet hastened to explain, carefully lowering her voice; ‘she’s
+thinking of wills and deaths, instead of settlements and marriages, no
+that they’re so far apart. Yes, it was just so, auld Drysdale left his
+money to his niece by marriage. He had no near relations, and though he
+had the word of being hard, he had aye a soft heart for the memory of
+his young wife who pined and died long before she saw her prime. He took
+her sister’s dochter, Beenie Pryde, and brocht her up to keep his house,
+and was as fond of her as if she had been his ain bairn. But there was
+an odds for all that; he could never altogether forgive her for marrying
+Jock Craig, and though he left her his means, as he had come bound to
+do, when he took her to rear, he did not trouble to mention her wean,
+that had not a drop of his blude in its veins.’
+
+‘Well, I mind something of the story, but I never heard all the ins and
+outs of it before. The Drysdales were not in our set, Miss Janet,’ said
+mild Miss Carstairs, not without what these old-fashioned ladies would
+have called a ‘fling’ at her hostess, in return for Miss Janet’s
+treatment of Miss Carstairs’ niece Tina and her ‘writer body’ of a
+husband.
+
+‘Who said the Drysdales were in our set, Kate Carstairs?’ demanded Miss
+Janet defiantly.’ They were not such fules as to set themselves up so
+far beyond their standing. They kenned their place and keepit it, which
+was more to their credit. But that did not prevent auld Drysdale’s being
+a man of some substance,’ composing herself to resume her story. ‘When
+the news of his death and his inheritance was sent out to where the
+Craigs had gone, it was found that she had died after giving birth to a
+lass bairn--our Miss Craig--the very same day that the auld man her
+uncle’s breath went out at Drysdale Haugh. I tell you, Miss Carstairs,
+it was nothing short of a dispensation of Providence that he was gone
+before her by the space of three hours, or Maggie Craig could not have
+touched plack or penny of his,’ ended Miss Janet, excited by the crisis
+of her narrative.
+
+‘She would have had to hurry if she would overtake him in his journey,’
+remarked Miss Mackinnon, with a smile that was a little ghastly, as a
+commentary on the conversation.
+
+‘What’s she after now?’ inquired Miss Janet, fairly mystified. ‘Oh, I
+mind,’ her face clearing up; ‘she’s so keen to lose nothing we say.
+Meye’s very sharp, but she’s apt to jump from subject to subject, by all
+the world like a bird from branch to branch. She’s off, as she thinks we
+are, to a joke we had among oursel’s this morning, of the bride’s
+remaining behind to look after the gear, and the presents that had not
+made their appearance in time, while the bridegroom went the first stage
+in solitary state. But I must awa’ to keep Gauvin and Miss Craig in
+countenance while they hear the settlement read--a trial to young folks
+in their position--and to append my signature as witness. I’ll leave
+nothing undone that I put my hand to. You’ll forgive me for leaving you,
+Miss Carstairs. You know, it’s not an ordinary occasion. If you like to
+stop till I come back, Meye here can be showing you Gauvin’s “traps,” as
+he calls them, his dressing-case and the studs and things in it, for I
+think you’ve looked over the bride’s paraphernely, or Betheye--I hear
+her coming in, she has been awa’ about the cards--will give you a tune.’
+
+‘No, thank you very much, Miss Janet,’ said Miss Carstairs, rising and
+expressing all the more gratitude because of the positiveness of her
+refusal. ‘I must run away myself--you will forgive me for having
+detained you so long, at such an important time, with so much on your
+mind as I see you have. The bride can have nothing to think of in
+comparison.
+
+‘I dare say no,’ Miss Janet accepted the implied compliment
+unhesitatingly, and without limitation. ‘What has a young thing like her
+to take up her mind about but to look bonnie and please Gauvin? It is me
+and my sisters that have to care for them baith and see that nothing’s
+forgotten, and to keep the cook and confectioner, the session-clerk and
+the minister, up to the mark.’
+
+‘I can feel for you, Miss Janet. When my niece Tina was married, though
+it was out of her father’s house, not mine, and it was not quite the
+same thing’--Miss Carstairs corrected herself hastily, catching a
+warning flicker of Miss Janet’s light blue eyes; ‘for Tina did
+condescend a wee bit, though Mr. Dalgleish’s a steady lad, and getting
+into a fine business, and there’s something to be allowed for a lassie’s
+choice--my very heels were sore, and I could not sleep for a week.’
+
+‘What are you saying about quadreels, or was it reels, Miss Carstairs?’
+asked Miss Mackinnon. ‘No, we’re to have no dance, only a degoonay in
+the French fashion.’
+
+‘I’ll not forget a bit of the cake with your cards,’ Miss Bethia assured
+the departing guest. ‘I’m to have charge of the cakes and cards, and you
+must promise to dream upon the cake.’
+
+‘Hoots! Miss Betheye, I’m done with dreams, which does not mean that you
+should be, you that can give us “Wooed, an’ married, an’ a’” so that our
+feet can hardly keep still, while I’m “timber-tuned.” You have so many
+more pretty pieces of work than those you’ve so handsomely presented to
+Miss Craig that she may get them made up for her drawing-room, it would
+be a real pity they should be wasted.’
+
+‘Awa’ with you, Kate Carstairs!’ cried Miss Janet, while Miss Bethia’s
+simper passed into a giggle; ‘would you rather have Bethia wasted than
+the ottomans and cushions, however elegant or creditable to her taste
+and industry? You would not have Betheye stoop to a man not in every way
+worthy of her and her family; and where is such a man to be found at
+this time of the day, I should like to hear?’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+TIME’S CHANGES.
+
+
+Seven-and-twenty years had passed with all their changes since the
+winter night on which Gavin Mackinnon and Margaret Craig’s marriage
+contract was signed. Six-and-twenty years had intervened since Mr. David
+Milne--the solitary representative of an old firm of Glasgow
+‘writers’--had wound up their century-long business, disposed of what
+was left, and retired with the accumulated gains to buy an estate in
+Kirkcudbright, and begin a new life as the founder of a family of
+Galloway lairds. Four-and-twenty years had elapsed since Mr. Dalgleish,
+the husband of Miss Carstairs’ niece Tina, finding the field too well
+occupied already, or that law was not so profitable in the West of
+Scotland as it had been, accepted a colonial appointment, and sailed
+with his family for New Zealand, to sit on endless boundary questions
+and judge the rights and wrongs of Maoris and settlers.
+
+Seven-and-twenty years, with all their vicissitudes--vigorous, full
+lives vanished like shadows, leaving no traces behind; new lives which
+had dawned and risen above the horizon, advancing to the hot glow of
+their noon; old stranded lives lingering on, apparently without use or
+purpose.
+
+The superannuated house in the old square was little changed, except
+that the narrow means of its occupants had grown narrower, until they
+pinched with the sharp pinch of poverty. Each one of the Miss Mackinnons
+was in her place, though it was becoming always harder and more
+comfortless. There had been a business speculation--soon coming to
+grief--into which the ladies had rashly let themselves be drawn, with
+the urgent desire of getting higher interest for their small capital.
+The end had been that the disaster which followed had swallowed up the
+larger part of the Miss Mackinnons’ pittance.
+
+The poor ladies had eked out what was left by the secret sale, bit after
+bit, extending over a period of years, of what they had been accustomed
+to cling to fondly as the proofs of their old gentility--quaint silver
+plate, a few jewels, a considerable quantity of fine lace--until the
+disposal of the family’s effects had come down to table and bed linen,
+and articles of furniture in daily use, which would fetch little money,
+while their absence would be severely felt. And always as the
+surreptitious sale approached its conclusion, starvation or the
+workhouse stared the unfortunate gentlewomen more fully in the face.
+Still they lived on, though the middle age of twenty-seven years ago was
+the old age of to-day--old age without its privileges and indulgences;
+while Miss Mackinnon was stone-deaf, and could only be communicated with
+by means of the slate and slate-pencil which hung behind her chair, or
+through a set of signs which the patient ingenuity of faithful affection
+had invented and maintained for her use.
+
+Miss Bethia, after a futile attempt to teach her antiquated system of
+music, had relinquished her piano and laid aside her embroidery, which
+proved unsaleable, to work at plain sewing, secretly disposed of at the
+very shop where the Mackinnons’ custom had still been an esteemed
+compliment in the days of Miss Bethia’s youth. Miss Janet did a
+servant’s work behind backs, in addition to taking her place before the
+world among the ladies of the house.
+
+Withal something heroic had crept in with the suffering into these
+narrow lives--something of Spartan endurance of hardship, of generous
+self-denial, of steadfast submission to the Providence that knew best
+what was fit for all. The Miss Mackinnons were frequently absurd enough,
+and in the increasing isolation of their experience they were getting
+homelier and more rugged and uncouth, falling back more and more on
+their old Scotch and their primitive manners, which they had always
+declined to lay aside, as something which had been good enough for
+former Mackinnons, so was good enough for their descendants and for the
+world till the end of time. But the women had never been so like ladies
+as in their silent, desperate fight with overpowering odds.
+
+A grain of hope remained at the bottom of this Pandora’s box. The
+Fentons of Strathdivie had not been so tenacious of existence as the
+Mackinnons in St. Mungo Square. One after another had dropped into his
+or her grave without direct heirs, till at last there was but one ailing
+man between the ladies and their share of Strathdivie.
+
+It had better be said at once that Strathdivie in its entirety was
+nothing more than a moorland farm in one of the wards of Lanarkshire,
+which, in the present state of agriculture, was anything save a
+flourishing possession; and it had not the supplement of dye-works or
+bleachworks, or coal or iron seams, to multiply its worth. Divided into
+portions, the allotment that might come to the Miss Mackinnons was so
+trifling that no man need have led a grudged life because of it. Yet
+that pittance meant such comparative ease and security to these
+hardly-bested souls that they could not help contemplating it afar off
+with longing eyes. It was the hidden burden on the consciences of all
+the three that they were wishing ill to poor Archie Fenton, not caring
+to hear that he had any chance of getting hale and hearty again,
+privately calculating on the probable length of days of a man who was
+younger than two of the sisters.
+
+To intensify the cruel uncertainty, it was suspected that on the few
+occasions on which Mr. Fenton and the Miss Mackinnons had met, for the
+connection between the families had belonged not to the present but to
+former generations, the two elder sisters--Miss Janet especially--had
+been so unfortunate as to give offence to the disposer of Strathdivie.
+She had interfered, as usual, where it was a particular want of tact and
+taste to interfere; and she had perhaps betrayed only too unmistakably
+what were her expectations with regard to the farm in the Middle Ward;
+while, it was believed, Archie Fenton was not without some power to
+‘will away’ from his distant cousins their share of his property.
+
+But surely he could not be so unnatural and unjust, the Miss Mackinnons
+argued with whitening lips. Blood was thicker than water, and a dying
+man would not dare to face his Maker after he had robbed his kindred,
+however remote, of their lawful patrimony.
+
+Where were Gavin Mackinnon and his wife that they did not come to the
+help of their aged kinswomen? One might as well ask where were last
+year’s leaves that they did not continue to clothe with fresh green the
+gaunt grey boughs of some venerable tree. The years which had spared the
+Miss Mackinnons had been as fatal to their nephew and niece as to the
+Fentons of Strathdivie. Both had gone to their long home many a day
+before. Ere their deaths the dyeing and calico-printing had thriven so
+badly in his incapable hands that first he had tried a partner in the
+concern, and that device not succeeding, he had, in the course of three
+or four more years, got from his wife the power of selling the property
+to the same purchaser to whom he had, in conjunction with his partner,
+already disposed of the business. The buyer of both was the son of a
+cousin of old Drysdale’s, the original laird of Drysdale Haugh. The
+younger Drysdale was a man whose father had sunk to a very inferior
+position. The son, on the contrary, had risen through every grade, till
+he was not only the sole proprietor of works and farm, but had improved
+and extended them, had made them a great concern, and had ended by
+building a fine mansion-house as an addition to the old farmhouse.
+
+Neither Gavin Mackinnon nor his wife had lived to hear what another
+man’s sagacity and energy had made of what they had let slip through
+their fingers. She had not seen the fifth anniversary of their marriage,
+and he had not survived her as many more years. There were people who
+said the couple had been done to ruin and death by the Miss Mackinnons’
+powers of talking and interference in their nephew’s private affairs.
+But everybody who knew anything about it was aware that Gavin Mackinnon
+could never have made anything of a trade to which he was not bred; and
+what was she fit for save to spend or spare as much of her own money as
+came into her hands? Then she died, as her mother had done before
+her--in giving birth to an only child, about whose arrival in this world
+his grand-aunts had certainly made as much fuss as if he were the heir
+to an earldom. Still, all things considered, these were circumstances
+over which the Miss Mackinnons could not have had much control. Neither
+ought they to have been held accountable for their nephew’s premature
+demise, seeing that no amount of enlarging even on disagreeable topics,
+and putting fingers into other people’s pies, could cause a wet autumn,
+telling considerably on a man who had never been alert about anything in
+his life save sport. In this particular instance he pursued it in
+soaking rain, till he caught a violent cold, which settled on his lungs
+and carried him off in ten days.
+
+During the lives of the husband and wife the sale of Drysdale Haugh had
+furnished them with a considerable sum in ready money, which they had
+not had time to spend, though he especially had done his best to get rid
+of what was so unfamiliar to him. What was left fell to their son, who
+had been reared, so far, under the care of his grand-aunts. But while he
+was a minor he could do nothing for them, and by the time he was of age
+so much of his patrimony had been spent on his education--worthy the
+last of the St. Mungo Square Mackinnons--and so much more in gratifying
+his kinswomen’s shortsighted pride and his own boyish fancy by the
+purchase of a commission for him in an infantry regiment, that there was
+little left to spare from his small income.
+
+Lieutenant Eneas Mackinnon was the pride and delight of his old
+relatives, the one cause of congratulation in the middle of their
+reverses, the single gleam of light in their far-spent, darkening days!
+For his credit and advantage they would sacrifice the little that
+remained to them, while he had only a dim idea of the straits to which
+the old ladies were reduced. He had wished to do something for them out
+of his chronic impecuniosity, and it was in a great measure their fault
+that they would accept next to nothing at his hands, lest the dear lad
+should be stinted and not able to make a fair show among his brother
+officers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+TAM DRYSDALE IN HIS OFFICE.
+
+
+There is no street in the whole city of bells and chimney-stacks with a
+greater and richer mercantile traffic, containing more offices in which
+business is conducted on a larger scale, than one of the side streets
+running parallel to the handsome thoroughfare of Buchanan Street. At
+certain business hours the street is as crowded with merchants and
+merchants’ clerks, warehousemen, wholesale dealers in all the
+commodities under the sun, as the Broomielaw is with porters and
+sailors, the Sautmarket and the Gorbals with naturalized Highlanders and
+Irish, or the different yards and lanes with craftsmen and mill-hands.
+When the swarm of dark-coloured ants hurry along the pavement, it is
+clear they mean business, hearty though the greetings are which burst
+from the deep-throated, deep-chested pedestrians, worthy of the warm
+hearts and frank tongues--careless of sing-song _patois_--of the mighty
+men of Clydesdale. They will not tarry on their errands; they have to
+put their shoulders to the wheel with a will, to bear up the load
+imposed upon them. No doubt these sons of Anak, like their servants the
+porters bearing the material bales and boxes, carry the burden of
+engagements and obligations unflinchingly, well-nigh swaggeringly. Still
+the giants show an inclination to get their work done as soon as may be,
+to allow greater time for play. Carriage, or dogcart, or steamer--the
+last in summer especially--whirl or puff the men away to the
+country-houses, with their trim avenues and well-kept parks; or the
+villas, luxurious as those of Roman citizens, by some mountain-girt
+loch of the blue Clyde, where pines replace the olive trees and heather
+the roses.
+
+At such early hours as are devoted to the patron saint of
+business--shall we say St. Luke?--few women, even when tucked under the
+wing, or following in the wake of husband, brother, or son, venture to
+bring the light incongruous flutter of their gowns, and the disturbing
+element of their unabsorbed faces into the rank and file of the workers.
+Heads of famous houses, young men with their fortunes yet to make, press
+on as if they would trample down all obstacles, and protest in
+self-defence ‘the de’il tak’ the hin’most!’
+
+Who would think that within a day’s journey from that striving,
+money-making mass of humanity the solemn Atlantic breaks on wild, lone
+shores, where the cry of the seamew is the only voice to break the awful
+stillness?
+
+Within a certain solidly handsome door, over which a porter of
+substance held sway, up a good staircase, under the circumstances
+singularly spotless, any stranger invading the territory would find
+another door, or rather pair of folding-doors, standing open. One of the
+doors bore a brass plate on which had been engraved the
+address--‘Messrs. Mackinnon & Murray, Dyers and Calico-Printers.’ The
+engraver’s tool had passed over three of the words, and the place knew
+its owners no more. The name which had replaced the others was that of
+‘Drysdale.’ But though so much change had been made, the word ‘Messrs.’
+was left to read like a foolish grammatical blunder, or as if the
+remainder of the address hung in suspense, which was the true
+explanation. The omission was not by accident, but by design.
+‘Let a-be’ the present master of the office had charged the
+respectfully-remonstrating engraver. ‘That may stand till another Tam
+makes up his mind, and then “& Son” can easily be added.’ He referred
+with would-be carelessness to his only son, and to the chance on which
+he had set his heart, that his one boy might join him in his career,
+might take up and extend the threads of all his projects, and, when he
+laid them down, might hand them over to a third generation. There was a
+little lurking superstition in the sparing of the ‘Messrs.’ already
+inscribed there, inappropriate as it was in the meantime. There was also
+the economy, almost parsimony, in trifles, which, in view of a future
+exigency, would save the smallest risk of unnecessary expense.
+
+Yet this was a man whose intelligence and enterprise had enabled him to
+supersede his masters, rising gradually to their level, and then soaring
+far beyond it, building up from a moderate foundation such a great
+business of its kind, as any man of his type might have been proud to
+claim for his individual handiwork. His daily business transactions
+involved questions of thousands. He did not think twice of signing a
+cheque for one or two of those thousands, to get possession of a picture
+that caught his untutored fancy rather than his cultivated taste. His
+wife’s diamonds were as brilliant as any to be met with in her circle,
+which was saying a good deal. He would have given a hundred for a hunter
+for his son, if Tam junior would have hunted with his compeers, the
+young swells of the mercantile world. He did give as much for a pony
+phaeton in perfect keeping, in which Claribel, or even little Eppie,
+could drive out her mother. But he objected all the same to the small
+waste in effacing the ‘Messrs.’ which might have ample significance in
+the years yet to be born.
+
+Tam Drysdale’s office not only held a large staff, it displayed every
+modern improvement and well-considered plan for their accommodation.
+Never were clerks better housed, stooled, or desked; blessed with more
+regular, if long, hours in a press of business; ensured greater
+punctuality at meal-times, or granted in turn more unfailing, if
+limited, holidays. But woe betide any of these ‘pets’ of Tam Drysdale’s,
+as they were sometimes termed derisively by less conscientious masters,
+if a subordinate was discovered shirking a duty or slurring over a task.
+These acts of cowardly, lubberly omission were treated as greater
+offences than what might have seemed heavier sins of commission, in the
+shape of occasional fits of folly and dissipation. Tam Drysdale had the
+scorn for prodigality and the disgust at intemperance which might be
+expected from a man whose rise in the world had been, in some degree,
+the result of his prudence and sobriety from youth to middle age. But he
+had mercy on a feather-headed lad who had got into debt for a gold watch
+and chain before he had earned them, or a suit of clothes the price of
+which was beyond the depth of his pocket. The employer had also a
+considerable amount of rueful pity for a middle-aged sinner who had at
+one time stood several steps higher than Tam on the social ladder, but
+who had lost heart, and sought desperately to console himself for the
+slowness of fortune in favouring him, by buying Dutch courage and
+oblivion, in swallowing the enemy that stole away his brains. On the
+other hand, for the lad or man who trifled or idled, and cheated his
+master of his services, Tam Drysdale was apt to have judgment without
+mercy. No wrathful words of ‘lazy blackguaird’ or ‘useless scoondrel’
+were hot and sharp enough to launch at the culprit.
+
+Tam Drysdale sat, like the king in the nursery rhyme, counting over his
+money, in the inner sanctum, which in many respects reflected the man.
+The various articles it contained--desk, table, chairs, carpet--were at
+once the very best and the very plainest of mahogany, morocco, and
+Kidderminster. The place was the essence of commercial comfort, and
+even neatness, as if a woman and not a man drew up the blinds, set the
+chairs at the proper angles, arranged the ledgers, and filed the papers.
+The room was almost ostentatiously complete, but there was an absence of
+luxury, a failure to recognise or claim any article that was out of the
+ordinary catalogue of office furniture, an impatience, bordering on
+contempt, of finery or frippery here, though it might be very well at
+Drysdale Hall.
+
+Tam Drysdale, leaning back in his chair, summing up an account with a
+little knit in his brow, was not far above fifty years of age, and in
+spite of all he had done before he reached his half-century he did not
+look older. He was a hale man still, not beyond abundantly capable
+middle life. He was below the ordinary standard of his native district
+with regard to size. He was not the ‘braw man’ whose stature alone
+ensures him popular admiration in the west of Scotland. He was little
+above the middle height, and he was so finely built that he looked less
+than he was. But it was a wiry slightness, and a delicacy that was
+tempered like the keenness of steel. There were force and activity in
+every well-knit, cleanly cut limb and feature; and the time had been
+when, in spite of his antagonists’ greater height and weight, Tam
+Drysdale had excelled in various muscular sports calling for more than
+accuracy of eye and speed of foot, such as quoits, shinty, etc.
+
+Tam’s clothes were of the best broadcloth, but old-fashioned and
+somewhat clumsy, as well as out of date. There was a suspicion of
+uncouthness in the style of the coat and vest, down to the very shoes
+which were not boots, that vexed the soul of Mrs. Drysdale, and even of
+Claribel, though young Eppie never could see that her father was
+anything save perfect, both in his outer and inner man. The truth was
+that Tam--very indulgent to his womankind in most particulars--became
+restive and utterly unmanageable when he was pursued into the holes and
+corners of what he reckoned his own affairs. He would not desert his old
+tailor, who had made Tam’s wedding suit and risen in the world with him,
+so far as a one-horse chaise and a villa at Gourock, though the poor
+fellow did not follow all the freaks of fashion, and could not please a
+parcel of fools of women. Tam would not make a puppy or an ass of
+himself by dressing in a manner which would better befit his son. This
+was supposing that young Tam ever condescended, nowadays, to appear in a
+coat superior to the last year’s shooting-jacket, which was decidedly
+the worse of the wear, as his father’s coats never were.
+
+In like manner, no power, less than his Queen’s command, would have
+induced Tam to drive in his well-appointed carriage to the door of his
+office. He stuck to the point that better men than he contented
+themselves with arriving at their places of business on their feet, or
+at most in their dogcarts, and he would never shame himself and them by
+instituting an odious comparison. He would not make himself a
+laughing-stock to his fellows--including his old cronies and his very
+clerks, who would be fully justified in saying that Tam Drysdale was as
+vain as a peacock, and had forgotten the nest he had sprung from.
+
+The carriage was in Glasgow several days a week with Mrs. Drysdale and
+the girls, and, for the sake of their company, the owner of the equipage
+would consent to meet it at some appointed place, as far out of the way
+of his ordinary haunts and associations as possible, and would drive
+home in a species of incognita with his family. However, this was a
+weakness to be carefully concealed. None of Tam’s vainglory--rampant
+enough elsewhere--broke forth in this direction. He positively hid his
+diminished head, and shrank out of sight when he was detected in the
+deed. He would no more have been guilty of driving in solitary state
+through those familiar Glasgow streets, where he had been wont to walk
+in fustian, than he would have worn a feather or a jewel in his hat.
+
+‘Me in a carriage for my convenience! humph! a cadger’s cart would set
+me better,’ he would say ironically. ‘What would folk think? What would
+folk say?’ (Tam was apt to regard himself as the cynosure of every eye,
+a source of endless interest and speculation to his public.) ‘Plenty of
+them to see that knew a’ about me when I had not a couple of bawbees to
+rub upon one anither. No, no! I’m not such a gowk as that comes to. I’ll
+not set a pack of impident fellows jeering and sneering. A carriage is
+all very well for mother, who is a woman and has married a rich man.
+Moreover, she deserves the best, and she shall have it, as sure as my
+name’s Tam Drysdale, as nice a turn-out as is to be seen in Glasgow.
+Neither the Provost nor Sir James can beat it. For the young folk,
+they’ve been born with silver spunes in their mouths, if that dour
+deevil, young Tam, would only sup oot of his spune and be thankful. But
+I was born to nothing better than a horn cutty [spoon], and a dugcart
+will serve my turn, as it has served mony a better man and mony a real
+gentleman born and bred.’
+
+Tam had a great deal of appreciation, almost tender in its kind, of real
+gentlemen and ladies. He never ‘evened’ himself to be one of them; he
+never ‘evened’ ‘mother,’ much as he thought of her, and proud as he was
+of her achievements in social life. Certainly he was inclined to put an
+inordinate value on his success; he hugged himself on all that money
+could procure and bestow. He boasted that no duke, no prince, need come
+before him in the excellence and costliness of his surroundings. Money
+would buy the best, and the best Tam Drysdale, who had risen and
+thriven, would have in house and stud and cellar.
+
+More than that--and Tam justly laid emphasis on the consideration--money
+would enable a man to benefit his fellow-creatures, to give them work,
+to insist that they should not live like brutes, to take measures for
+their higher civilization. But, in estimating the power of money, he
+drew the line with regard to what it could do beneath inherited gentle
+breeding. He never failed in the respect which belonged by right in his
+judgment to ancient gentility, however reduced in circumstances. He
+testified instinctively and unhesitatingly his honour for that to which
+neither he nor ‘mother’ could ever attain.
+
+Nay, Tam had his doubts whether his very children could pretend to be a
+real gentleman and real ladies till another generation or two had lived
+and died. They might not do it--not young Tam, who was clever and
+college bred, and, if he did not awe, troubled his father considerably;
+not Claribel, who was as independent, had as fine a time of it, and was
+as innocent of considering anything beyond her own will and pleasure, as
+the American girls to whom she bore some resemblance; not even little
+Eppie, who was as kind and guileless as her mother, and was both her
+father and mother’s darling. Young Tam and the rest of them were on the
+way to what was beyond auld Tam’s aspirations; but they had not yet,
+with all the advantages their father had been proud to buy for them,
+reached the desirable goal.
+
+Gentlemen and ladies, pure and simple, were removed several degrees from
+common clay in Tam Drysdale’s eyes. This implied no sycophancy or
+slavishness on the man’s part. He could assert his claims, if anything,
+a trifle too loudly. It belonged rather to a broad sense of justice
+which would be fair to every man, and own in another what he himself
+could not win--just as he expected that other to admit Tam Drysdale’s
+superior achievements in his own line. It might have something to do
+with Tam’s nationality; with the feudal element, the loyalty to heads of
+houses and clans which long survived in some form in Scotch society;
+with the slight but indestructible strain of poetry which often
+underlies the prosaic matter-of-factness of Lowland Scotch natures.
+Anyhow, there was found in the man this relieving trait of generous
+admiration and regard for what was not tangible property, and for what,
+unlike tangible property, could not be taken by assault on the part of
+the _nouveau riche_, the conqueror of modern times. The sentiment formed
+part of a composite character, and unquestionably it softened, to a
+wonderful extent, the vulgarity of the contrasting traits of
+self-sufficiency and ostentation.
+
+Tam Drysdale’s face was so clean shaven that it not only rejected beard
+and moustache, it barely admitted of the most modestly cropped and
+abridged rather stubbly brown whisker to match the brown hair, hardly
+dashed with grey. It was a decidedly handsome face, of a massive type,
+with a square jaw, a square forehead, a good straight nose, and a good
+full mouth, which no self-indulgence had spoilt; while neither had a
+humid climate nor the apples and pears of the Clydeside orchards done
+anything to impair the whiteness and regularity of the strong even
+teeth, one of the many signs of health about the man. The colouring of
+the face was fresh, with its native ruddiness just toned down by
+office-work; but the hands, which had once been stained all the colours
+of the rainbow in the dye-vats, were now only too white and soft--not
+brown and hacked like young Tam’s, or even like those of young Eppie,
+who had a weakness for playing at boy’s games.
+
+Taken all in all, the aspect of the calico-printer was wholesome and
+attractive, and it had much of the quiet power and burgher dignity which
+are to be found in many Dutch and Flemish portraits.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+TAM DRYSDALE’S ALLIES.
+
+
+It was impossible to stand aside and watch what went on in Tam
+Drysdale’s office, without seeing that he was a man of mark and
+influence in his sphere, not only by the number of men and of letters,
+in the interests of calico-printing and Turkey-red dyeing, constantly
+appearing on the scene, but by the tone which each speaker and writer
+adopted in approaching Tam. He was virtually acknowledged a leader of
+men in his calling. His opinion was consulted, his arbitration asked,
+his decision accepted. His word was in a manner law. He sat or stood
+there, a king in his domain. All who entered it paid him homage. His
+clerks were on the alert to meet his requirements. His wishes were
+anticipated. When he moved, everyone figuratively stood up; though
+literally no one hated form and ceremony more heartily than Tam Drysdale
+hated them. He was simple--one would say personally unassuming and
+unexacting in his habits, even in his greatest vanity. It was not that
+the man was a tyrant, or a martinet, or a fool, that he was so served
+and observed. It was a curious tribute to the natural strength of
+character, and a certain trust--inspiring, uncompromising honesty, which
+had always distinguished him.
+
+Tam Drysdale’s _clientèle_ were of an agreeably varied description. They
+did not come all on the same day, but specimens of them turned up
+frequently. Old city magnates, much more imposing and fashionable than
+the man they called on, who gave his broad shoulders a shake, and termed
+his visitors ‘new-fangled;’ grave and reverend signors, pursy and fussy,
+in the sister trade of cotton, who could have cut huge slices from the
+national debt, swallowed them wholesale, and not felt themselves
+seriously the worse. Bankers and lawyers who have always an interest in
+a man of capital; clergymen who feel bound in duty to themselves to
+avail themselves of the command of the mammon of unrighteousness, in
+return for their oversight of a parishioner’s soul. Young fops and bucks
+who condescended to know something of the mysteries of bleaching,
+dyeing, and printing, that these might procure the sinews of war
+wherewith to wage a feud to death with the fishes in the sea, the foxes
+on the hillsides, the grouse on the moors, or to keep up without stint
+or stay the luxuries of the gentlemen’s yachts, the amenities of their
+clubs, the splendour of their balls.
+
+One of the richest of these young men sauntered in, and was treated with
+unmistakable coolness and stiffness; while the proposal that he was
+there to make was curtly rejected. There had been a question of a
+lawsuit of no great moment in which both men were engaged. The dispute
+referred to an encroachment on a patent in which they were equally
+interested. The abuse had not gone far, and the penalty which might be
+exacted would only amount to a moderate sum of money, of little
+consequence to a man with Tom Drysdale’s income. On the other hand, the
+suit was likely to be both troublesome and prolonged, and all the other
+persons engaged in it, with the exception of the lawyers, sought to
+quash it at this stage. But this Tam flatly refused to do.
+
+‘I wull not, sir,’ he said, his politeness becoming more marked, while
+his dialect grew broader, under the provocation. ‘It is the principle I
+care for; it is justice I want; I will have the knavish trick exposed.
+Base loons, who knew perfectly well what they were about when they used
+the stamp! Punish a starving man for picking my pocket, and let off
+lazy rascals who have not the wit to know a good discovery when it is
+laid before them, but are cunning enough to set themselves to steal it,
+and grow rich at the expense of others! Never.’
+
+The young man had to return more quickly than he came, muttering between
+his teeth, when he had passed out of the inner office, ‘A dour old
+brute. Grist to the lawyers’ mill.’
+
+The last of Tam Drysdale’s levée were honest practical bleachers and
+dyers, who came to report progress in contract, to seek employment, to
+enter into an alliance offensive and defensive with the master of the
+Drysdale Haugh Works. Of this class, though of a different sex from the
+other members, was a respectable modest-looking young woman, not more
+than comely in her personal appearance, and, though clean and neat in
+her dress--a calico gown, black cape, and straw bonnet--altogether sober
+and out of date beyond her three or four and twenty years. To her Tam
+Drysdale turned with marked courtesy, and showed a reflection of
+fatherly kindness in his manner, as he rose up, waved her to a chair in
+his private room, and closed the door behind her.
+
+‘Come awa’ in, Mary, my woman; I’m very gled to see you. Sit you down
+and rest you: you’ve had a long drive this dull grey day. How’s your
+father? Eh lass! but I mind him a fine man, the buirdliest [most
+stalwart] bleacher far and near. Well,’ in a more subdued, sympathetic
+tone, in answer to a sorrowful shake of the young woman’s head, ‘the
+strongest of us must grow weak as water when our time comes, and he is
+well off to have a gude dochter like you, Mary, since his gudewife is
+gone, to hold together the bit bleaching-ground, and keep the pot and
+the kettle boiling, and mind the other mitherless weans. I’ll tell you
+what, Mary Coates, though you should not hear it, maybe, you’re the very
+picture of your mither; you’re a fine, discreet, eydent kimmer
+[diligent girl] that any father might be proud of, and that some lad
+will be blithe, as well he may be, to call his marrow some day. You
+shall never want any small help that I can give you in your most
+honourable career, both for your father and mither’s sakes and for your
+ain!’ exclaimed Tam Drysdale, striking his hand on his desk in the
+determined manner of a man who had long been unaccustomed to
+contradiction, and who could rise to enthusiasm on occasions.
+
+‘Oh, sir, sir, bide a wee [wait a little] till you hear a’ before you
+praise me so,’ cried Mary Coates, who instead of sitting down in the
+comfortable chair offered to her, stood disconsolately by the table,
+crushing a passbook between her trembling cotton-gloved fingers. ‘I have
+not brocht you back a penny of the loan you were so gude as to gie us,
+that should have been paid this last term. I have tried my best, but
+trade has been slack and wages high, and father’s doctor and medicines
+mak’ sic a hole in what is laid by, that I have got no farther than the
+interest, which I think you’ll find correct. Father said I was bauld to
+come wi’ that alane, when it was the principal that should have been
+paid, and you were aye a man who stood by your word and your day. But I
+thocht the interest was better than naething. It would show at least,’
+with the faintest dry sob, which decent reserve stopped in her throat,
+‘that I was trying--that I would fain pay a’, if I could.’
+
+‘That you would, Mary, my fine lass!’ cried Tam almost fiercely, with a
+suspicion of moisture in his own keen, clear eyes, ‘and so would your
+mither before you--a gude stock, root and branch, that’s what you are;
+and what’s a term or half a dozen of terms’ credit more or less between
+me and your father and mither’s dochter? But I’ll take the interest,
+because I think that will be best, and I ken it will go nearest to
+contenting you. Then you’ll tell me what I can do to put a job into your
+father’s hands, without letting on [mentioning it]; it will be a secret
+between you and me--after you’ve given me the news of him and the weans.
+Now, no thanks, Mary; I cannot abide them,’ he stopped to say
+peremptorily, ‘least of all from a gude young lass like you; you’ll
+oblige me by leaving them out, while you sit down there till I write you
+a receipt.’
+
+Before Mary Coates left, Tam Drysdale went into the outer office and
+called one of his senior clerks to speak aside with him.
+
+‘Mr. Dunlop, I’ve Miss Coates of the Cairnie Burn Bleaching Green with
+me. I want you to take her round to Fergusson’s, and see that she has
+the best luncheon that can be had in the place. She has a long road to
+drive back to Cairnie Burn. Then I want you to look over the orders and
+see if there is any job within Coates’s powers that you can hand over
+to him.’
+
+‘Very well, sir,’ answered Mr. Dunlop, a dapper little man with a top of
+hair, not ten years younger than his master.
+
+He spoke more resignedly than with the briskness natural to him. He had
+been taught by his grown-up daughters (Glasgow men in his class marry
+young) to estimate women who were not intimately connected with him a
+good deal by the quality and style of their dress; and he did not relish
+passing through the busiest streets of Glasgow, where he was well-known,
+to the restaurant, in company with ‘a countrified, common-looking lassie
+like Mary Coates,’ at the hour when a multitude of other clerks were
+going to their dinners.
+
+Tam Drysdale was quick to perceive the reluctance and fiery to resent
+the slight to the object of his attentions.
+
+‘Dod, man!’ he cried, with an angry snort, using the familiar form of
+address that cropped up in his speech occasionally to the older clerks,
+who had been fellow-servants with him in ‘Mackinnon and Murray’s,’
+before there was any thought of a clerk becoming a master, or Drysdale
+Haugh returning to the hands of a Drysdale. ‘If you have any serious
+objections I’ll rax down my hat and go mysel’. Willie and Jean Coates’s
+dochter--as fine a lass as ever stepped--shall not be looked down upon
+or held at arm’s length, so long as I can prevent it.’
+
+‘I have no serious objection, Mr. Drysdale,’ said Dunlop hastily, but
+still a little drily; ‘why should I? I’ll do my best for the party you
+mention, and I’ll see to the orders,’ seeking to change the subject, and
+at the same time not without a malicious desire to hit a weak point in
+his superior’s armour. ‘I thought, sir, you objected to giving them out;
+that you held the small bleaching and dyeing works were a mistake--a
+sort of snare to the petty bleachers and dyers, who came to loss and
+ruin in the end, so that the whole of them--works and men--should be
+suffered to die a natural death.’
+
+‘There is no rule without an exception,’ said Tam shortly, for he hated
+inconsistency either in himself or in another. ‘Never mind what I
+said--I suppose I may speak at random, like my neighbours, when I do not
+choose to wale [choose] my words, as if they were said in the hearing of
+an enemy. But you are nobody’s enemy, Geordie Dunlap, that I ever heard
+tell of’--he corrected himself with recovered good humour--‘unless your
+ain whiles. For you’re a gabby [talkative] creature, and will speak up
+for your way of the matter, in season and out of season, as long as the
+breath is left in your body. Do as I bid you, and let us hear nae mair
+o’t.’
+
+Tam Drysdale turned on his heel, and when he was in his room and the
+door shut on Mary Coates and her escort, he reflected for a moment,
+with his hands in his pockets, before he dismissed the whole subject,
+and gave his mind to some of the many other questions demanding his
+attention.
+
+‘Set Geordie Dunlap up!’ he mused--‘a gusedib laddie, a ragged callant
+no so lang syne. No doubt it’s all the more credit to him to have worked
+his way up to a gude coat on his back, a gude house at Pollokshields, an
+elder’s seat in a U. P. Kirk, and lodgings for his family for a month at
+a time, instead of just the Fair-days, down the water. But he’s of
+another stock to the Coates; as well even them to the Duke’s race. I’m
+not come from the dirt myself. There were Drysdales in the Loaning, not
+so far from Drysdale Hall, as soon as there were Coates in Cairnie Burn,
+and Lamonts in the Crook. But the Coates and the Lamonts were a cast
+above the Drysdales when I came into the world. They had kept their bits
+of crofts when my father, though he was next-of-kin to Drysdale of
+Drysdale Haugh and the dye-works, had gone to the dogs. I mind when I
+would have been a proud man to have counted myself fit to walk by Jean
+Lamont’s side through the streets of Glasgy. Yet Geordie Dunlap, the
+auld puppy, thinks shame to be seen with Jean’s wiselike dochter Mary.
+Bowls run round, no doubt, and I grant, though I’ve the greatest--the
+very greatest--respect for the fine lass who is so like her douce, sonsy
+mither, I am not free to say, after all, that I would have cared to
+convoy her myself through the streets to the eating-house, or the inn
+where her beast is put up. A man is forced to mind the look of the thing
+and what belongs to his position. I might have met Clary with some of
+her fine graith, and it might have put the bairn about; though she’s not
+given to mind, which I, who have lifted her up to a higher footing, have
+no right to do. It’s all for the best. Jean Lamont chose Willie Coates,
+as she had every right to do--I said it at the time, before I had won
+any title to speer her price, and ask her if she would not look at me.
+There was no wrong done, and Willie was my friend, puir chiel’, that
+never reminded me how a Drysdale had fallen out of the ranks, and was no
+longer a mate for him any more than for Jean Lamont. I could not wish
+him harm, though harm enough--death, sickness, and poverty--have long
+had him in their grip, without any wish of mine. And I have thriven, and
+married bonnie Eppie Mercer--than whom a better and a bonnier wife, and
+a kinder soul, could not have been given to a man. She has borne me
+three wiselike bairns, and I’m content if they’ll but be pleased,’ with
+a sigh spared from his complacency for young Tam, who was unreasonably
+ill to please.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+TAM DRYSDALE AT DRYSDALE HALL.
+
+
+This was not one of the days when any of Tam Drysdale’s womankind were
+in the town with the carriage, laying an obligation on him to make his
+way to them; for he did not care that they should come to him, unless
+they walked to the office and accompanied him on foot to the private
+corner at which he was to sink Tam Drysdale the city man, and take up
+Tam Drysdale the proprietor of Drysdale Hall and of its sundry
+equipages, who was bound to show himself sometimes in the second
+character. On the present occasion he could drive out to his country
+house in the modest state which, as a matter of personal propriety and
+taste, he preferred--starting from the office door, not without a
+little commotion within and a little flourish without, nodding to the
+various acquaintances he met, and looking about him like a man at his
+ease.
+
+Tam had driven along that road almost every lawful day for a number of
+years. He knew and noticed all the landmarks both in town and country.
+He was at leisure to observe them, for although, like most countrymen,
+in whatever station they have been reared, he could drive, the practice
+did not recommend itself to him, as it would have lent itself to a
+younger, more self-conscious or more restless man. He liked his own
+particular groom, a steady old countryman like himself, to drive. The
+master was on the best terms with the servant, unless when Simpson, for
+the sake of his horse, his honour, or the principle of the thing, like
+his master, felt bound to cry out against a bad habit of Tam Drysdale’s.
+This was a practice of letting the children that he passed twice every
+day on the road, going to and from the parish school, hang on behind the
+dogcart during the slow progress of the horse, after it had slackened
+its pace to accomplish the ascent of a hill which was in convenient
+proximity to the children’s village.
+
+‘Sir, it’s what no ae beast in a thousand would put up wi,’ remonstrated
+Simpson, every time, looking grimly over his shoulder, and fingering his
+whip with the strongest inclination to lash out behind, though he was a
+man and a father when he did not happen to be touched in a professional
+quarter. ‘What will folk think of our driving wi’ sic a tail at our
+heels? It’s not respectable. Forbye, these bairns will go to the
+mischief some day, through being let tak’ such unwarrantable liberties
+with a gentleman’s dugcart and horse.’
+
+‘And driver,’ added Tam Drysdale, with a twinkle in his eyes. ‘Do you no
+mind, Simpson, how grand sic a ride was lang syne? How it tasted all the
+sweeter because there was the risk of a backward cut across your
+fingers and your face, and you left dancing with the pain of the worst
+pawmy you ever got, in the middle of the road. I cannot find it in my
+heart to deprive the puir bit things of the pleasure. There, be aff,
+bairns!’ he admonished his tail, as the curricle reached the brow of the
+hill. ‘The horse will be awa’ again like a fire-flaucht in a couple o’
+minutes, and ha’e some of you down in the stour, wi’ broken banes, if ye
+dinna tak’ care.’
+
+The dull, grey spring day cleared up when the heavy pall of city smoke
+was left behind, and the sun shone in a blue sky, dappled with white
+clouds over a green country--a fair morsel which had escaped the pits
+and blast furnaces that honeycomb and blacken the earth, and burn with a
+red glare throughout the night, for many a mile around Glasgow. Here was
+left a remnant of the orchards and woods which once made the whole of
+Clyde’s banks ‘bonnie.’ The humid air that comes on the wings of the
+west wind promoted verdure, and rendered the spring vegetation early and
+luxuriant beyond any standard it attained on the bleak east coast.
+
+But it was not a spot given up to Pallas and Pomona. Their province was
+not uninvaded. Tam Drysdale’s works were within a mile of his house, or
+hall as he had chosen to call it; but whatever their offences, they were
+mild by comparison with those of the coal and iron plagues. The stretch
+of meadows devoted to bleaching glistened white in the spring sunshine,
+as if strewn and silvered with millions of gowans. The dyeing and
+printing operations either did not include all the chemical abominations
+of St. Rollax’s, or dispersed them over so large an area that they were
+little felt. They might colour with a sanguine hue, for the most part,
+the water of Aytoun--the tributary of the Clyde on which the works were
+built--and poison the fishes, at least so anglers complained; but the
+compounds did not impregnate the air with hideous odours, or disfigure
+the landscape with blights.
+
+Indeed, as Tam Drysdale drew near the house he had made for himself,
+just as Geordie Dunlap had been figuratively the architect of his ‘bien’
+house at Pollokshields, Tam held up his head and snuffed the air with a
+great increase of satisfaction. The fields and hedgerows on each side of
+the road were part of the inheritance to which, though it had belonged
+to his forefathers, he had _not_ succeeded by ordinary succession from
+his father and his father’s cousin, the old laird of the land and owner
+of the dye-works. What was far better in Tam’s eyes, he had won them
+back by the sweat of his brow and the wit of his brain, and valuing them
+by the cost of the acquisition, he did not believe there were fields or
+hedgerows like them in Lanark--nay, in broad Scotland. The cattle and
+sheep in the pastures, the horses in the furrows, were his. It is
+doubtful whether he did not also claim the crows in the air. If the
+office in Glasgow was a spot to which his mind went out, for which he
+started with a will, to be in the swing of business, Drysdale Hall, down
+to every clod of its clay and stone of its walls, was the pride of his
+heart, like his wife Eppie and his son Tam. The latter, though he
+thwarted and galled his father because he was his son, his only son, his
+might and the beginning of his strength, ‘the excellency of dignity and
+the excellency of power,’ however contumacious he might prove, came
+nearer to Tam’s heart than either of his daughters--even than his young
+pet Eppie.
+
+It is hard, after all, to say whether a man loves more profoundly, with
+a more passionate attachment, the paternal acres which have belonged to
+his race from time immemorial, on which he first saw the light, that
+have been associated with every act of his life, or the land which he
+has bought by the hard toil of his youth and manhood, the fruits of
+which are the fruits of his own labours, the reward of his
+self-devotion. Drysdale Haugh had in some measure both of these claims
+on Tam Drysdale.
+
+Drysdale Hall had only escaped being a huge staring pile of white
+masonry from the circumstance that Tam, proud as he was to have built up
+a house, was also proud, with the Scotch hankering after gentle birth,
+that the place had belonged to Drysdales long before it had come into
+the hands of Mackinnons or Murrays, and that these Drysdales had not
+simply been respectable yeomen-farmers--they had been enterprising
+enough to erect dye-works on their property, and they had been
+undeniably ‘sib’ to his less flourishing branch of the Drysdales. For
+this reason Tam had spared the old farmhouse of Drysdale Haugh, and left
+it the nucleus of the new building, rendering it more incongruous
+certainly, but less raw and purely aggressive.
+
+The farmhouse had been, and was still, a two-storied building of
+substantial freestone, with a heavy stone porch, the whole grown over
+with ivy, which, luckily, its present proprietor had spared, not so much
+from a sense of its beauty, as because of its memories, especially one
+tender recollection linked with it. He had been held up by his mother to
+see his first bird’s-nest under the glossy, dark-green leaves on a
+Sunday evening, one of the rare occasions when the poor relative had
+been invited to visit the rich. To this ivied centre, with its small
+windows and narrow door, no longer suitable for a main entrance, Tam had
+tacked on two spacious wings fit to fly away with the body of the house
+between them. The hall, with its big door, was in one of these wings;
+the other ran out in a long one-storied building which was, in fact,
+Tam’s picture-gallery, where he stored the specimens of art he had
+taken pains and delight in collecting.
+
+Originally the farmhouse stood in a little garden on the edge of a
+stackyard, built, for winnowing purposes, on the side of a hill. Garden
+and stackyard, with the old farm-offices, had alike disappeared, and the
+ground was converted into a really fine terrace, commanding not only
+Tam’s snow-white bleach-fields, but much of the adjoining country. The
+hillside, which had been transformed into the terrace, had descended
+naturally into a little wooded den that remained enclosed in the
+grounds, and served for a short avenue. A somewhat perking porter’s
+lodge, guarding gorgeously wrought iron gates, led from the high-road
+into the carriage-drive that now ran through the den, and terminated
+with a broad sweep on the terrace. Nature had done something for Tam’s
+mansion; and his architect had availed himself of nature in a
+praise-worthy manner.
+
+On the opposite side of the house were the gardens and greenhouses, of
+some extent, maintained with a sovereign disregard of expense. Beyond
+the gardens lay the stables, coach-house, kennels, and servants’ offices
+generally; and there, whatever drainage, ventilation, encaustic tiles,
+and every recent invention could do for the comfort and well-being of
+man and beast, was done thoroughly, to the credit of Tam Drysdale and
+his myrmidons--be they builders, grooms, or grieves.
+
+So perfect was the smooth order in every department, where money, freely
+used without abuse, served to oil the wheels of the domestic machine,
+that the Drysdale Hall farm-offices, like the Drysdale Haugh Works,
+figured as models for men to copy. Strangers would bring introductions,
+and request to be taken over the place. Sir James Semple, of Semple
+Barns, who was Tam Drysdale’s next neighbour, and on the best terms with
+him, brought three-fourths of his visitors to wonder and admire.
+
+As Tam Drysdale drove along the terrace, at the well-known sound of his
+wheels, greetings met him from two different quarters, with a swiftness
+suggestive of the pleasant explanation that he had been watched and
+waited for.
+
+In the porch of the old part of the house, which now sheltered a side
+door, there suddenly stood, framed by the ivy and rose boughs, which
+were only sending out green shoots as yet, Eppie the elder, Eppie the
+matron. Mrs. Drysdale was already dressed for dinner, like a rose in
+full bloom, in her rich dark silk, and always with fluttering lace and
+pink ribands about her head and throat--unless when she went into
+company, and replaced the ribands by flowers, dew-dropped with diamonds.
+She was persuaded that they ‘set’ her, and that Tam liked her with pink
+bows and strings, such as she had worn in her Sunday bonnet (she called
+it ‘hat,’ though it was no hat), long before the days that she put on
+caps, when he had come to the kirk where her family worshipped, to meet
+and court her in the face of the congregation--like an honest man--as
+well as to pray to his Maker like a good Christian.
+
+Mistress Eppie was buxom and bonnie still, of a type of
+beauty--dark-haired, dark-eyed, white-skinned, with summer roses on the
+cheeks, and teeth white as milk, between ripe red lips--which, if not
+peculiar to Clydeside, is oftener met there than elsewhere. It belongs
+to strapping lasses who are matches for stalwart men, though in this
+case the wife was not more strapping than the husband was stalwart; both
+had missed the superior stature which is the frequent accompaniment of
+their style of good looks. Mrs. Drysdale was accustomed to say, with
+apologetic regret, that her Tam and herself were but ‘sma’ bouket’ (of
+short stature), matched with many of their compeers. Husband and wife
+were alike in this respect, as in many another. If the type has little
+of what is purely intellectual or spiritual, it has, as has been said
+with regard to Tam Drysdale’s comely person, a great deal that is
+wholesome and full of health and vigour, that will endure, and, what is
+more, will retain much of its attractiveness after the black or auburn
+hair is grey, and the fresh, firm cheek withered and shrunken in its
+wintry red.
+
+Mrs. Drysdale came out to meet her husband, as she had come, unless
+necessity was laid upon her to be elsewhere, ever since the two had
+become one. She had done it when Tam had taken her first to a
+four-roomed house in a village street, when she had but to cross the
+threshold into the hallan, to greet the young working-man trudging home
+after his day’s toil. She had known the sound of his foot then, as she
+knew the sound of his horse’s feet to-day. She never failed him when she
+had a grand staircase and a long corridor to traverse, instead of a
+doorstep to cross. He was still the light of her eyes, whom it was as
+natural for her to hail, as it is for the newly-awakened sleeper, after
+the hours of darkness have passed, to turn instinctively to catch the
+first stray beams of light. A contented and happy woman in most
+respects, as she found herself, it was still her night when Tam was up
+in Glasgow at his office, or even over at his bleach-fields and
+dye-works; her day when he came home with the sunset or the starlight to
+her and the bairns, to be theirs till the next morning rose and called
+him forth to play his man’s part of making a great business, earning a
+heap of money, and being a prince among his fellows. And she was sure
+that Tam was glad to see her standing there, the first to welcome him,
+though in his proud, shy, Scotch way he said no more than, ‘Well, are
+you there, mother?’--as if he ever expected her to be elsewhere!--‘What
+have you all been about the day?’
+
+The pink bows and ends of her ribands were a little too much like a
+reflected glow from her cheeks, brighter and less delicate than of yore.
+Her dress had a tendency to rustle. There was an excess of trimness
+about it in every plait and pucker. She was too smart. The very apron
+which she wore, though she was dressed for dinner, was embroidered in
+silks all over, and she had too many and too costly rings on her plump
+white fingers.
+
+She had somehow managed, with misdirected ambition, to give an
+undesirable varnish to the native Doric of her tongue, which, in robbing
+it of its simple rusticity, lent it a false lustre that by no means
+improved its quality. She shared with her husband a positively
+exasperating exuberance of satisfaction with their acquisitions and
+surroundings, so as to tempt the world into seeking to lower the
+couple, were it only by an inch, from their pinnacle of self-conceit. It
+served as a mortifying reminder to their friends that Mr. and Mrs.
+Drysdale, in spite of their many virtues, were made of common clay after
+all: for if man and wife had been composed of finer, rarer stuff, they
+would have understood for themselves that a man’s life does not consist
+in the things he possesses; they would have known that wealth can do no
+more than confer the lower gratifications, and would have ceased to be
+infatuatedly elated by their outward prosperity.
+
+The other person, who opened a French window on the ground-floor of the
+new part of the building, and came skipping out of it, the faster to
+reach and greet Tam Drysdale on his arrival, was likewise a woman. She
+also had been wonderfully constant in her attentions since she had been
+able to toddle, with or without her mother or nurse’s consent, into
+dangerous proximity to the horse’s feet, sidling up to the dogcart,
+standing confidently, her little face one broad grin, which cast out the
+smallest conception of fear of repulse, till she should have her reward.
+It was to get the whip, twice as long as herself, to hold, or to be
+caught up and tossed in strong arms, placed in the seat of honour, and
+driven up and down the terrace, shrieking with delight at the promotion.
+This was Eppie the younger, who had grown from a lovely child to a slim
+and beautiful girl of sixteen--such a juvenile copy of her mother in
+hair, eyes, complexion, teeth, smile, in her very fondness for soft
+pink, like the colour of her own cheeks--that the striking likeness
+between the mature matron and the slender lass became almost comical in
+the points of agreement and of difference in the two versions of the
+same original.
+
+Little Eppie, in the changed circumstances into which she fitted, had
+even caught up something of the broad Scotch which--varnished or
+unvarnished--fell, as a matter of course, from the elder lips, but
+sounded so quaintly on the younger. Eppie’s brother and sister were free
+from this lingering distinction. Mrs. Drysdale could pride herself on
+the fact that her son, young Tam, and her elder daughter, Clary, spoke
+as if they were reading out of a printed book. Young Tam did so from
+sheer earnestness; Claribel from set purpose, in all moods. It was not
+so in Eppie’s case; and with traces of the speech she had inherited a
+portion of the rustic tastes in which the heads of the house now only
+indulged as a relaxation--a private relaxation. To eat oat-cake and
+drink buttermilk, when they might have had the richest of plum-cake and
+the dryest of champagne; to sup on new potatoes and salt herrings, when
+the eaters might have dined at the same hour on turbot and turkey, or
+salmon and lamb, were treats to Eppie no less than to her father and
+mother--only the girl, if she had got her own way, would not have taken
+them surreptitiously.
+
+There were other enjoyments for which Eppie had an hereditary
+inclination, though the knowledge of them could only have come to her by
+hearsay. She would have liked to work in the harvest-field, to seek and
+find hens’ nests and bring in the eggs, to carry home every sick chicken
+and deserted lamb she could come across, and become its foster-mother.
+She would have liked to milk the cows, and in default of so high and
+hopeless an attainment, she haunted the dairy to skim the milk in the
+basins and press the whey from the curd in the cheese-tubs. She would,
+if there had been any chance of her gaining permission, have sought to
+ride her pony bare-backed, and tried to groom him with her own little
+hands.
+
+Claribel cared for none of these practices any more than if she had been
+born a duchess; indeed, the chance was that if she had been her Grace,
+she would have looked at them longingly, as Princess Elizabeth looked at
+the milkmaid carrying her pails.
+
+If Claribel Drysdale suffered herself to feel aggrieved by any of the
+manifold contradictions in the bearing of the family, it was by her
+younger sister Eppie’s perverse disposition ‘to run wild,’ as Claribel
+called it emphatically, in aping primitive sayings and doings which were
+all very well, or at least excusable, in her father and mother, who were
+elderly, and had been more plainly brought up. Claribel would never
+allow herself to approach nearer to the hole whence she had been dug
+than such a vague phrase as this. But it was wrong as well as absurd in
+Eppie--such folly would damage her prospects if she were let alone--her
+conduct might even prove injurious to the fortunes of the rest of the
+family.
+
+As it had happened, this was one of the instances in which Claribel’s
+power failed. Her mother, to whom she was polite, sometimes even
+affectionate, stood greatly in awe of her elder daughter, still more so
+than of her son Tam. Claribel had also an odd double influence over her
+father. He respected in her the education and tastes which were beyond
+him: and he felt bound to support her, in the career which he had opened
+up for her, by removing, as far as possible, every hindrance out of her
+path. Altogether, Mr. and Mrs. Drysdale might have been worked upon to
+the painful extent of denying themselves a good deal of Eppie’s society,
+checking her in the very expressions and practices she had learnt
+through love for them and sympathy with them, and sending her away to
+the finishing school of which Clary so often spoke.
+
+But Eppie was a tower of strength in herself. She proved too much for
+them here. She had no more fear of her sister Clary than their brother
+young Tam had. She laughed at and defied her. Clary was all very well
+sometimes, when Eppie had toothache and Clary nursed her, or when Clary
+was in a communicative mood, and chose to give the details of her
+parties; then she was ‘a dear,’ and quite nice and amusing. At other
+times she was ‘prideful and upsetting,’ and had little time or attention
+to spare for home. But in neither case was she ever to come between
+Eppie and her father and mother. She would not yield her consent to
+being sent away from her happy home, Drysdale Hall, neither would her
+father and mother have the heart to force her.
+
+Why, what would they do without her? Who would bring father his slippers
+and his posy? Who would cut his hair and read the newspapers to him? Who
+would be mother’s companion when father was at business, help her to
+give her orders, and see the stores weighed out, and be her little
+‘prentice housekeeper? No doubt Clary pretended there was no need for
+mother to keep house when Mrs. Wood was so clever and experienced, and
+had been housekeeper as well as cook to Lady Semple’s brother--as if
+mother could live without a house to keep, although there were twenty
+Mrs. Woods to do it for her! Who would walk to the gardens and the
+washing-green with mother, and gather the lavender, and pull and shell
+the peas, and fold the clothes, as she was fond of doing; and surely
+mother could please herself, and do what she chose, else where was the
+good of her being married to father, a rich man, Eppie would like to
+know?
+
+Why, mother would feel quite lonesome and eerie in a great big house
+like Drysdale Hall, though Tam and Clary were both ‘to the fore.’ Little
+good they were--Tam buried in his books and papers, and Clary away with
+her grand friends. Mother must have her silly little daughter Eppie to
+sit and sew beside her, and get her to tell stories about the
+sewing-school and the singing-school mother attended when she was
+young; and how she had sold her mother’s butter and cheese so well that
+she had been granted a quarter at the dressmaking, where she had been
+clever, and picked up enough of the trade to make all Tam and Clary’s
+frocks when the children were little, which was more than Clary, with
+her accomplishments, could do for herself, now that she was big.
+
+Eppie did not hesitate to assert that she would rather learn dressmaking
+from mother, and perhaps some day make a gown which mother herself would
+be proud to wear, and to say, ‘My daughter Eppie made it for me,’ than
+jabber all the French which mademoiselle could stuff into her. For Eppie
+had possessed governesses, both native and foreign, and it was from no
+want of such polite literature as they could impart that she had
+developed an out-of-date rusticity and homeliness.
+
+In the end, Eppie’s own strenuous, indignant, tender will, coinciding
+with her parents’ secret strong inclinations, carried the day against
+the wishes of ‘Madam,’ as Eppie and her mother--the latter with bated
+breath and sundry twinges of her tender conscience and pricks of her
+soft heart--were sometimes driven to call Clary.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+MORE OF THE DRYSDALES.
+
+
+So Eppie was at home, to run out, in sweet rivalry with her mother, to
+claim her father’s first look and word.
+
+‘Oh, father, I’m so glad you’ve come! I’ve been wanting you this whole
+afternoon. Dr. Peter and Athole have been here, and they can give me one
+of their Newfoundland pups; and will you walk over with me, after
+dinner, and fetch it, for mother cannot leave the house, in case the
+Carricks should call, and Tam will come in ower late, and be
+cross-tired? And, oh, father, how long has “White Breeks” taken to do
+the road to-day? Simpson--now, Simpson, you need not make a face, I’m
+not going to say any ill, and you know that you said he would beat Dr.
+Peter’s “Lady Fair,” if you, father, would only let Simpson lick aff the
+bairns, when they hang on behind, at the Birlie Brae.’
+
+‘And how would you like your licks yourself?’ demanded her father, with
+an assumption of grave reproach. ‘Was that the way I brocht up my last
+little girl?’
+
+‘Well, but I would not lick them sore, father,’ explained Eppie, in
+earnest good faith; ‘only such a skelp [slap] as I would not have minded
+taking myself. But you will walk over to Barley Riggs with me for the
+pup?’
+
+‘Bairn, your father will be tired,’ remonstrated her mother. ‘The pup
+and you can bide a night apart, sewerly,’ with the little mincing
+pronunciation which served as the queerest finish to her broad speech.
+
+‘Oh! if father is tired, I can wait; I’ll not mind the pup,’ said Eppie
+heroically, without being able to carry out the heroism effectually, so
+as to conceal that the twelve hours’ delay in the appropriation of the
+puppy would be as twelve years to her. Tam could not keep up the joke to
+the hurting of his favourite.
+
+‘Feint a hair am I tired!’ he exclaimed triumphantly; ‘I could walk to
+Glasgy, let alone to Barley Riggs. But I’m thinking, my lassie,’ he
+added more seriously, surveying his daughter, while Simpson drove away
+with the dogcart, and the family group were left on the terrace, ‘you’ve
+little need of a towsy tyke [rough dog] to set you an example in
+rouchness; you’re more like a Newfoundland dug yourself than a young
+leddy, sitting with your hands in your lap in your mammaw’s
+drawing-room.’
+
+In truth, Eppie’s silky black hair, at which her father glanced with
+mingled admiration and disapprobation, was more after the fashion of a
+furze-bush than even the style of the day required. Her thin pink gown,
+designed to replace her morning-gown with something more akin to
+evening-dress, was decidedly creased and tumbled, and two neglected ends
+of white tape were straying disconsolately down from her waist behind.
+
+Eppie looked only a little abashed, however, as she made two conscious
+clutches at the ends of the tape.
+
+‘It’s just my strings that I’ve forgotten. Why should a lassie have
+strings as well as hooks and eyes to fasten? I believe dress-makers send
+them on purpose to plague their customers and make life a burden to
+them. I was in a hurry in case you should be back before I was ready.
+No, mother, I had not Nicol to look after me. Do you not mind she was
+dressing Clary for the first tennis-party this year? I do not care for
+tennis, with young ladies and gentlemen running about flourishing bats
+and keppin’ [catching] balls, but never forgetting their steps and their
+carriages; and I know young Tam hates the whole thing as much as I do.
+I used to like croquet when I was little, and you and father came out
+and played too, and helped me through the girds [hoops]. I have been
+giving wee Willie Finlay such a grand jow [swing] in the jow father put
+up for me lang syne, between the saughs at the end of the osier-beds.’
+
+‘But, my lamb, you’re getting ower big for a jow,’ her mother
+remonstrated gently; ‘and Willie Finlay’s an impident little sorry, to
+let you jow him,’ with a quick flash of indignation--‘the manager’s
+wean, and you the maister’s dochter!’ for the worthy woman was by no
+means without the sensitive feelings of the employé who has become the
+employer, especially where her children were concerned.
+
+‘Mother, you’ve forgotten,’ said Eppie, with soft reproach, and a shade
+of gravity on her round rosy face. ‘Poor Willie is as deaf as a horn,
+and cannot play with the other bairns.’
+
+‘No doubt the little chappie’s afflicted,’ granted Mrs. Drysdale
+relentingly, ‘and you may send him in to Wood or me for a jelly-piece
+whenever you like; but it’s time you let jowing alane.’
+
+‘Why, mother, I’m just sixteen,’ protested Eppie in her turn, with a
+swift resumption of her light-hearted gaiety: ‘I have heard you say that
+you and my aunties had a jow fixed between two of grandfather’s stacks,
+and that many a time when you had gone out to play hide-and-seek in the
+gloamin’, father here would give you the best jow you ever had, till
+grandmother called you in to your supper.’
+
+‘Bairn, it’s not canny to tell you tales,’ said Mrs. Drysdale, with one
+of her old bright coy blushes. ‘Manners have changed since then,’ she
+said, seeking to dismiss the subject, with a disturbed sense of how it
+would sound to Clary, her own eyes glistening at the same time at the
+remembrance of the innocent ‘daffing,’ which was so much freer and
+merrier than anything she saw now among young people--some of them
+doucer and more doleful than their elders.
+
+But Tam Drysdale struck in, inspired by the recollection:
+
+‘Weel do I mind it, Eppie, my doo [dove]; many a brave jow I gave her,
+without her saying so much as “hooly” [stop]. If the coast were clear
+and the rope stout enough, I would give you both a fine jow, though
+mother there is not so licht as she was in the auld days.’
+
+‘Fie for shame, Tam!’ cried Mrs. Drysdale, as the other Eppie laughed in
+high glee; ‘you maun be daft to speak such nonsense. What would Clary
+think, and poor young Tam, who is so solid, if they heard you? What
+would the maids and the men, and Sir Jeames and my leddy say, forbye
+Captain Mackinnon, who is in the same regiment as young Semple, and is
+paying a visit to Semple Barns--no less?’
+
+‘I do not care a bawbee what any of them say, if I am doing no harm,’
+maintained Tam stoutly. ‘I may surely give my ain wife a jow or a
+kiss--it’s a’ ane which--if it pleases me, an’ hip ower what the world
+says about it. But it’s true, mother, we’re growing ower auld for play;
+we had better leave it to the young anes, if they were but as spunky
+[spirited] and blithe as we were a score of years syne. Are you two
+women to keep me waiting here all night? Do you know I’m as hungry as a
+hawk, and I’m to sort myself before the gong sounds?’
+
+Eppie and her mother retreated obediently to the drawing-room--an
+apartment gorgeous in satin damask, ebony, gilding, mirrors, and
+china--which Clary had striven in vain to subdue according to the Queen
+Anne standard. The redeeming features of the room were its good
+pictures--several landscapes of the last schools--French and Belgian, as
+well as English and Scotch--in addition to a presentable family group,
+taken by a clever artist when the children were still young, and an
+abundance of flowers, of which both the Eppies were very fond.
+
+Claribel was absent; young Tam did not make his appearance till the last
+clash of the gong. He had inherited the good looks of both father and
+mother on a larger scale. He was a big, bearded fellow of
+three-and-twenty, with his father’s square forehead and massive face,
+and his mother’s brown eyes. But there the resemblance ceased. There was
+either a load of care or a burden of discontent, or both, in his low
+knit brows and the drooping corners of his mouth. For whatever reason,
+he was at war with himself and with his world. He looked even as if he
+had dressed against his will, and with some scorn for the operation. He
+ate sparingly, and as it were with reluctance and self-disgust, of the
+plainest food that was to be had at the sumptuously provided table. He
+drank nothing save water. He hardly joined in the conversation,
+answering briefly the observations addressed to him. He either bestowed
+no attention on Eppie’s liveliest sallies, or repulsed them with pained
+sharpness--a treatment which she requited by not minding it.
+
+Withal there was a determined gravity approaching to solemnity, and a
+certain self-consciousness about young Tam, which did not imply that he
+was not in earnest; it simply hinted that without knowing it he was
+playing a part, and however worried and perplexed, was receiving
+considerable high-flown, melancholy satisfaction from the sense of an
+heroic performance. His whole aspect belonged to his age, and could
+hardly have existed at any other stage of existence. It had an aroma of
+exaltation and self-martyrdom about it, which had its comical side for
+those who could see it. Unfortunately the audience were blinded. They
+did not understand the phenomenon with which they had not before come
+in contact, and it affected them too nearly for them to measure it
+correctly. The young man withdrew on the earliest opportunity, muttering
+an excuse about a lecture he had to prepare.
+
+‘That fellow gets worse and worse every day,’ said Tam Drysdale, holding
+up his glass of port and staring into it as the door closed on his son.
+The elder man spoke with a mixture of gloom, displeasure, and wounded
+feeling, which, unhappily, is a tone not altogether new or strange to
+fathers. ‘What would he have? What would he be at? One would think he
+has all that the heart of a young man could desire, if he would only see
+it. A fell difference in what I had to do and to bear when I was his
+age. No choice of dishes for me to despise. No wine standing untouched
+at my elbow. By George! I was glad of a whang of bread and cheese, and
+my pull at a jug of sma’-beer to wash it down, many a day; or I went
+without, hungry and dry, till I could pay my way, and lay by a penny to
+rise in the warld, provide for a family, buy back the auld place, and
+make my own out of it, as I have done. No turning up my nose at gude
+victuals, preferring the worse to the better, and turning upon my heel
+like a lord--or an ass,’ ended Tam, with a snort of resentment.
+
+‘His books and his lectures,’ he began again, with strong disdain. ‘Is
+the lad never to have done with his edication? I have not grudged it to
+him. I could call the whole town of Glasgy to witness that he has got
+the best I could find for him at home and abroad, and welcome. But what
+is he the better for it? In my day a man was fain to be out of his
+‘prenticeship and start as a journeyman, once and for all. But Maister
+Tam, there, seems willing to bide in his ‘prenticeship till he’s
+grey-headed, and what he’s to do then I’m not likely to see. He’s such a
+clever hair-splitter that he can’t make up his mind. Well, he is a
+bauld beggar! As fine a business as any of its kind in Glasgy,
+ready-made to his hand, and he stands aside and casts laiths [corn] at
+it. Ah! if I had gotten the tenth part of his chances!’ he finished,
+with angry emphasis.
+
+His wife and daughter were listening in respectful silence--not awed,
+but daunted, as the kindest of men will daunt his womankind, when the
+men begin, in contrast to their usual indulgence, to launch vials of
+wrath at domestic grievances.
+
+‘Maybe, Tam, you were better without the chances,’ his wife ventured at
+last to say mildly. ‘It’s finer to win your success than to have it
+gifted to you. The gift maun have its drawbacks and temptations. It’s
+just that our Tam, poor chiel, has ower kind a heart and tender a
+conscience. He’s no easy about the rich and the poor, though I’m clear
+the Bible owns them baith. He cannot bide that the one should be so well
+aff and the other perishing for lack of the necessaries of life, though
+there does seem a needcessity for the inequality. Yet it whiles troubles
+me mysel’ that we should be sitting here, not to say aboon the danger of
+want, but with our wines and wa’nuts, hiz that were not bred to anything
+great, and folk we have kenned not worse than ourselves, maybe a hantle
+better, and used to different treatment, are ill aff, and trembling for
+what’s to come.’
+
+‘We’re not here to mend the whole economy of things,’ said Tam gruffly.
+‘We can but make the best of what we find, and well for us if we do as
+much.’
+
+‘Folk did not ask so many questions when we were young,’ poor Mrs.
+Drysdale went on, with what was in fact a crafty defence of her son.
+‘The most feck had not the time, if they had been gude enough to have
+had the will. You need not screw your face,’ a little angrily. ‘Our lad
+is gude--we may be thankful for that, Tam Drysdale; no just decent
+outwardly, but gude at the heart, for as little as his father thinks of
+it. It is his gudeness partly that torments him. I could trust him far
+and near. I maist think,’ with a sigh, ‘that though it would have been a
+sore wrench, and it is hard for you, poor auld lad, that your son you
+thought so muckle of should not consort with you and succeed you in the
+works and the Hall here, that you’ve wrocht so hard to bring to
+perfection--it would have been better, since you twa are not like to
+agree, to have let young Tam go out to Australia as he had a mind to
+do.’
+
+‘And what would he have done there, I should like to know?’ inquired Tam
+contemptuously. ‘I have yet to learn that Australia, though it offers an
+opening for shepherds and blacksmiths, has a market for book-learning.’
+
+Mrs. Drysdale held up her head. There was a crimson spot on each cheek,
+and she ceased to mince her words. No one--not even his father--should
+sneer at her son in her hearing, and she not speak up for her bairn.
+
+‘He could fecht his way as well as anither. He’s young and strong, has
+wit, and is as steady as a rock, and can thole [endure] like his
+neighbours. None could tant him there with the fine chances and the
+dainty faring that he flings awa’--not because he’s saucy, but because
+he thinks shame to take what he has ne’er earned, when he kens there are
+hard-working men fain to be content with a soup of thin kail or a bit of
+fat pork, a crust of dry bread or a cauld potatie at mony a meal. There
+may be mair britherliness--were it but of hardship--out yonder; and it
+might help him to be at peace with God and man--my braw lad!’
+
+‘And what does your son think himsel’?’ retorted Tam, in the irony of
+the question disowning his relationship to the culprit; ‘that he is to
+redress the wrongs of the world, and flee in the face of his Maker? I’ll
+tell you what: he must have consorted at his colleges--I wish he had
+never seen their faces--with a pack of blackguaird demagogues and
+democrats that never earned an honest penny, and so cannot bear to see a
+decent man enjoy what he has striven and spared for, but would take it
+from him, or by their tales go share and share alike--a grand piece of
+generosity with another man’s goods--whenever they had the luck. I’ve
+always had my doubts of your superfine friends of their kind, that ken a
+lot better and are a deal more disinterested than ordinary mortals.
+Trust me, that those extraordinary gentlemen will come out at the tail
+of the cart, morals and all, before they have done.’
+
+‘Oh, Tam! you’re ne’er evening young Tam, your ain flesh and blude, to
+such gentry?’ cried Mrs Drysdale, ready to break down in her distress.
+
+Then young Eppie, having finished her grapes, put her oar into the
+entanglement. She had been a spoilt child, accustomed to give her
+opinion, and it was seldom that she remained so long silent in any
+discussion between her father and mother when she was present.
+
+‘If I were you, father, I would let young Tam alone, and take no notice
+of his strum. He always comes round sooner to what I want, if I just let
+him alone.’
+
+‘Hold your tongue this moment, Eppie!’ exclaimed her father with
+unwonted asperity, for he could not bear even his favourite daughter to
+interfere between him and his son. ‘What does a bairn like you ken o’
+such matters? It is true what Clary says, that you’re ower forward in
+some things and ower backward in others.’
+
+‘Oh! if it’s Clary I’m to please, and if it is her word that is to be
+taken for what I ought to say or do---- ’ protested Eppie, with a lump
+in her throat that prevented her from speaking further.
+
+‘Tam, you’ve hurt the bairn. I do not know what has come ower you,’ said
+Mrs. Drysdale reproachfully, turning again upon her husband. ‘What harm
+has she done? Is it so great an offence that she should speak up for her
+brither? You let her have her head out the one moment, and you curb her
+the next. What justice is there in that? Yet you men pretend to be sae
+just!’ with a fine scorn that sat as strangely on her as wrath on a
+mother-hen.
+
+Thus sat upon on all sides, Tam Drysdale began to find himself in the
+wrong, and to give way.
+
+‘I did not mean--- ’ he said, growing abashed before his wife and
+daughter; but before he could get any further, Eppie sprang from her
+seat and flung her arms round his neck.
+
+She could no more bear to hear her father reflected upon--and it was all
+the worse that it should be on her account--than her mother could stand
+an attack upon young Tam.
+
+‘Say what you like, father; scold me if you please; who has so good a
+right? You have been ower kind to your youngest lassie, and to us all.
+Tam will not be the last to see that, some day. But I did not mean to be
+forward; only I thought I would like to tell you how I managed Tam.’
+
+‘Managed him, you gipsy! you’ll be managing me next,’ protested the head
+of the house; but it was said fondly, harmony was restored, and the bone
+of contention dropped.
+
+In the course of the evening, when after all Eppie and her father did
+not go to Barley Riggs--for the engagement slipped out of his mind, and,
+at a hint from her mother, Eppie docilely let it go--Claribel came in
+from her tennis-party, which had merged into a dinner. A dinner-dress
+had been sent to her, the carriage had followed the dress, and she
+returned in it in full array, and joined the others for half-an-hour.
+She was a decidedly handsome young woman to those who put full weight
+on a tall, broad-shouldered figure, regular if somewhat strongly-marked
+features, and a neck and arms like alabaster. There was also something
+in the girl’s expression that recommended itself to many people--not
+without reason--something resolute and fearless. There was nothing weak,
+nothing in keeping with her sentimental Christian name, which, to tell
+the truth, Mrs. Drysdale, in the dawn of the family prosperity, had
+borrowed from the title-page of a sheet of music. Claribel knew her own
+mind, and obeyed its dictates without hesitation. There was an absence
+of anything either faltering or paltering, unstable or underhand, about
+her. She was a person to be comfortably relied upon, so far as she went.
+
+Claribel Drysdale was a year younger than her brother, and six years
+older than her sister. She had prized the worldly advantages which were
+hers as highly as her father or mother could prize them, and she had
+never had any warring inclinations or lingering first loves to dispute
+the sway. She had made the best of being a handsome girl, and a rich and
+popular man’s daughter, in a society of wealthy and pleasure-loving
+people. She had young-ladied it as a man might lord it, with all her
+heart and soul, not so much arrogantly as with an agreeable
+forgetfulness of any other state of being. She had been incapable of
+being deliberately unkind or unfeeling, but she had been full of herself
+and the good time she had of it, her dress, her jewels--many and costly
+to belong to a young girl--her horses; the dances, dinners, and picnics
+in which she joined; the plays, operas, charity bazaars and sermons at
+which she figured, to the exclusion of all besides.
+
+But this was only a stage in Claribel’s existence; as she had soon grown
+up, so she had soon passed beyond her earliest development. She had
+quickly grown dissatisfied with the fruits of mere wealth, and taken to
+the products of rank and generations of culture instead. She had
+inherited her father’s respect for real ladies and gentlemen, without
+his contented hopelessness of ever attaining to their merits. Nothing
+was beyond Claribel Drysdale’s ambition, and the neighbourhood and
+friendship of Lady Semple afforded her an opening for gratifying her
+tastes.
+
+Beyond this she was, as her father said, ‘not minding.’ She had the
+grace not to interfere much with the others, unless on Eppie’s behalf.
+She left young Tam to his ‘Radical fads,’ contented that time would cure
+him of them. She swallowed down lightly, with no more than a slight
+grimace at times, the discrepancies, which no one saw more keenly than
+she did, between her father and mother and the style in which they
+lived. If she did not show great filial respect and regard, and never
+dreamt of rushing out to meet her father, or being never so happy as
+when she was with her mother, like Eppie, Claribel did not fail
+signally in her duty and affection to her elders. She behaved with
+proper deference, and acted with far more philosophy and apparent
+good-humour than her brother, young Tam, displayed.
+
+Fine feathers were not wanting to set off a fine bird. Miss Drysdale, of
+Drysdale Hall, was too well instructed and paid too much heed to
+details--for she was one of those strong women, wise in their
+generation, who never neglect a detail--to dress for dinner as she would
+have dressed for a ball. But while she complied with established rules
+and stopped short at the appointed limits, she gratified her natural
+liking for what was not so much soft or bright, elegant or exquisite, as
+for what was rich and magnificent. Claribel wore a pale moire, with lace
+trimmings and such a set of coral as a countess might have envied. She
+was quite a splendid figure in her shimmering silk and red and gold
+necklace, as she presented herself without her opera-cloak in the
+drawing-room, where Eppie was initiating her mother into the mysteries
+of ‘bézique’ to replace ‘birkie’ and ‘catch-the-ten,’ coming in natural
+succession, which the two had played together, of an evening, ever since
+the younger Eppie was old enough to hold a card, while Tam Drysdale read
+his newspaper.
+
+It was comprehensible that the father and mother should look with pride
+on such a daughter, that even Eppie, whose bright eyes were more
+critical, should bestow her meed of approval on her sister. Here was
+something to show for the parents’ pains that was not to be found in
+young Tam, though the lad was a scholar, and out of the ruck of ordinary
+young men. Here was a more satisfactory conclusion, if it were a
+conclusion; neither was the satisfaction fatally qualified.
+
+True, as a rule, Mrs. Drysdale was not quite at ease before her elder
+daughter; less so than before her son, who seemed to be above noticing
+trifles. Even Tam senior, though too manly and too much of a philosopher
+in his way to have any serious apprehensions of what Clary might think
+of his sayings and doings, was troubled with an amount of respectful
+consideration for her which on special occasions was apt to hamper him
+in her company.
+
+But the effect she produced on her father and mother was rather the
+result of the working of their minds than of hers. Claribel was
+reasonably good-natured. She had a general friendly, if somewhat
+condescending, wish to have her family share in her pleasures, though
+they could not always comprehend them. She was a fair talker, when she
+was disposed to talk, and as she sat discoursing lightly on the company
+she had just quitted, indicating the individualities of its different
+members, touching upon their eccentricities, here and there mimicking,
+not very maliciously, their defects--how Mr. Muir stumped about as he
+walked; the constant use Sir James made of the epithet ‘ridiklous;’ the
+manner in which Colin Hunter contrived to look past the epergne at Mary
+Campbell--though the gossip was superficial, sometimes a little hard and
+caustic, never indicative of height or depth or fine sensitiveness,
+beyond dispute it was entertaining.
+
+‘And what did you think of Captain Mackinnon, Clary? What was he like? I
+mind well his father was master of the Haugh when your father came back
+here and brought me with him. I mind his mither too. She died when he
+was born, poor woman! They said she had murned for want of a bairn, and
+she laid down her life for this one,’ said Mrs. Drysdale
+compassionately.
+
+‘If you mind Gavin Mackinnon,’ said Tam, ‘you mind a feckless, incapable
+man; a sort of fellow with a grand manner and big words, if that were
+enough.’
+
+‘Well, his son is not like him,’ said Claribel, with a laugh. ‘He is too
+lazy, and has too much “pride that apes humility.” I dare say he’s not a
+bad sort of young man. Dick Semple seems to have a regard for him, and
+Lady Semple says he is the tamest cat she ever had about the house. The
+last curate did not efface himself half so effectually. Only it is not
+modesty in this case; it is pride and poverty. He has not a captain’s
+commission, mother; he is only a lieutenant yet, like Dick Semple--a
+rank which does not count.’
+
+‘What do they call him, then?’ inquired Mrs. Drysdale; ‘an offisher used
+to be muckle thought of in Glasgy, and the power to put Captain or Major
+or even Lieutenant before the name was prized next to the uniform.’
+
+‘Uniform has become mufti,’ said Clary, ‘and is only worn on parade; and
+lieutenants have disappeared, unless in the Gazette. They have fallen
+back among the civilians, and are heard of only as plain Mr. Semple, or
+Mr. Mackinnon.’
+
+‘Keep me! I would have thought I had been insulting the lads if I had
+not given them all their honours,’ said Mrs. Drysdale, musing upon what
+would have been the consequence of the two young gentlemen’s calling at
+Drysdale Hall, while she had laboured under such a mistaken impression.
+
+‘They get honour enough,’ said Tam, ‘even without their uniform and the
+handles to their names. All the silly lads and lasses--and aulder folks
+that should know better--are fain to run after them, because the trade
+of war is genteel, and a prince may be a cornet, or whatever you like to
+call him.’
+
+‘But you like to read about battles, father,’ interposed Eppie, ‘and
+you’ve helped at the presentations of swords to officers.’
+
+‘Of course, my lass, of course. The wabster [weaver] and the dyer in
+the wabster’s train, could not weel do without the warrior, and there’s
+many a good sodger come from Glasgy, forbye Lord Clyde and Sir John
+Moore. But the warrior must be the genuine article, and not a carpet
+knight, like a good wheen of the soldiers we see in the piping times of
+peace--the heroes of Glasgy drawing-rooms. The worst of it is that some
+of the puppies look down on their entertainers, laugh at them to their
+faces, and would give them the cauld shoulder any day if they met them
+at Semple Barns, or Pollock, or Blantyre.’
+
+‘Mr. Mackinnon could not very well do that, father, with his father
+before you in the works here,’ remarked Clary carelessly; ‘neither would
+he if he could--he is too much of a gentleman. All the same, I think his
+mother will be the only woman to die for Mr. Eneas Mackinnon, which is
+but fair, since if the _rôle_ were reversed I do not believe he would
+take the trouble of dying for any woman under the sun.’
+
+Clary had not heard of the old aunts in St. Mungo’s Square, and she was
+an entertaining young woman when she was in glib speech. She promised to
+be as great a social success as any woman could aspire to be; while her
+brother Tam, in his own room, engaged in reading up for one of the
+lectures which would come to nothing, threatened to be as great a social
+failure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+RORY OF THE SHELTIES.
+
+
+The Broomielaw has not borne a broom ‘cow’ for many a year. ‘Ane little
+quay’ has gradually extended to a long line of wharves, where traffic
+reigns. Warehouses abound with goods from the four quarters of the
+globe, shops with a seafaring flavour, though the sea is not at hand,
+and they deal in the common necessaries of shore life; the homely
+dwellings of these humbler shopkeepers, sailors’ lodging-houses,
+commercial hotels, look down upon the busy thoroughfare and the river
+highway.
+
+Among the crowd of shipping, steamboats, multiplied mightily since Henry
+Bell’s little _Comet_ plied between Glasgow and Greenock, and was the
+wonder of the day--arrive at all hours at the Broomielaw. Many of them
+are Highland boats from ‘Glasgow down the water,’ the villa settlements
+that fringe the Clyde and the lochs. And far beyond the islands that
+begin with Bute and Arran is a Scotch archipelago--shaggy, heathery,
+rocky, castle-crowned here and there, guarded by savage mountains and
+wild sounds. That is the region of green Morven near thunder-haunted
+Knapdale, pillared Staffa, sacred Iona, lonely Barra and Canna, and the
+primitive, desolate Western Hebrides, in which Stornoway ranks as a big
+town.
+
+The communication between all these places and the more civilized south
+is by water, and mainly by steamboat. The passengers and the cargo in
+these Highland boats, when the first do not consist of enterprising
+English and American tourists, and the second of their baggage, are
+sometimes strange enough, but they are sufficiently common in that
+quarter of the world to attract little attention. Besides, people are
+too much engrossed with their own affairs to have notice to spare for
+those of their neighbours. Thus nobody looked and nobody cared, when, on
+a rainy April afternoon, an odd figure stepped out of one of the boats
+that touched at some of the farthest-off islands, shook himself,
+clutched an ancient knapsack that might have seen service in the
+Peninsular War, and stumbled along, casting wary glances out of the
+red-lashed eyes, right and left, like a spy reconnoitring a new country.
+
+The stranger was a man a little over thirty, weather-beaten, and with
+the shambling gait that often accompanies a defective intellect, which
+makes up in cunning what it lacks in strength. The Highlander did not
+wear the kilt, which he perhaps regarded as inappropriate in the low
+country. He had compounded with the claims of the Sassenach in his own
+territory, by assuming one of his few remaining articles of dress--a
+pair of tartan trews, in which the greens and reds were faded into
+sickly olives and dingy browns. With these he had on a little tartan
+coat originally made for a much smaller man, so that the waist was
+between his shoulders, and the sleeves ended not far below his elbows.
+The dress was completed by a Glengarry of the same set, perched on the
+wearer’s shock head of red hair. His face was as ugly as a ferret
+complexion, high cheek bones, a wide mouth twisted slightly to one side,
+and the longest chin on record, could make it.
+
+But in the middle of this man’s ugliness and the guile which blinked out
+of his eyes, there was a strain of simplicity and patience in the whole
+aspect of the creature. There was also a manifest determination not to
+betray any surprise at whatever he might see, but to affect that his
+native clachan was as fine a place as Glasgow any day. He glanced at the
+long lines of houses that opened from the quay, and betrayed, by the
+blankness of his gaze, that he did not expect to see a living soul he
+knew, amongst the thousands in the great city. He instinctively turned
+his eyes from the eating-houses and provision-shops, conveying a
+suspicion that he was both hungry and thirsty, but dare not indulge in a
+supererogatory meal, till he had ascertained where he should find and
+what he should pay for the cheapest and humblest of suppers and beds.
+
+He wandered along Clyde Street, not caring to ask his way, past the old
+Gaol, giving a doubtful, almost timorous look at its sombre exterior,
+and came out upon the Green--the glory of East-End Glasgow. If the Earl
+of Moray were to see it now, would he know it to be the same Green on
+which he encamped his army before he crossed the river to win, under
+Mary’s despairing eyes, the battle of Langside? Would Prince Charlie
+recognise the spot where he reviewed his Highlanders on their return
+from Derby, after their rags had been exchanged for the twelve thousand
+linen shirts, the six thousand cloth coats, and the thousand blue
+bonnets required by the rebels from the Whig town which flourished by
+the preaching of the Word? Even the Chartists, who not more than thirty
+years ago gathered there, ten thousand strong, with wolfish
+famine-pinched faces and bony hands, brandishing the iron bars torn from
+the railing, or the guns snatched from the locksmiths, would not have
+felt themselves at home on the smooth turf, amidst the flower-beds,
+resting on the seats provided for wayfarers, gazing their fill at the
+water which, though it is less clear than when Moray and Prince Charlie
+crossed it, is still dear to the born and bred Glaswegian.
+
+Rory of the Shelties, who had travelled all the way from the farther
+Uist, where he had left his charge of rough ponies behind him, was much
+puzzled by the Green. He thought he had strayed into some gentleman’s
+grounds, and with due consideration for the gloomy building he had
+passed near the entrance, he behaved himself most gingerly, and sought
+anxiously for the nearest mode of exit. Then he remarked the style of
+the occupants of some of the benches, and proceeded far enough to come
+on the spot set aside for the operation of carpet-beating, which was
+going on briskly; and even his dull brain took in the conception that
+those fine walks were somehow free after the fashion of his own bare
+hills, and that he might, without fear of being called to order, sit
+down, as he could not do in the street, and consider what should be his
+next movement.
+
+Rory dropped promiscuously on a seat, and stared rather vacantly at an
+empty and stationary merry-go-round, which waited for the Fair, to
+revolve with a noisy load. Rory had never seen anything like it before,
+and was inclined to think it was some new-fangled threshing mill,
+though why put down so far from any trace of a farm, he could not
+pretend to say. The only sign he had given that he observed a
+fellow-sitter near him, was his clutching more tightly his old knapsack.
+
+Rory’s neighbour was an aged man with a nut-cracker face, and his
+fustians so clean as to suggest an infirmary or a poorhouse, or at least
+that their wearer was beyond work, with possibly a notable wife or
+daughter who took pride in the respectability of a well-washed and
+whole, though patched, suit for the ‘man body’ of the house. But if the
+bent body and feeble, wrinkled hands, grasping and sustaining themselves
+on a blackthorn stick, were beyond labour, the bleared eyes were not
+beyond observation or the tongue seen between the shrivelled lips and
+nearly toothless jaws destitute of the power of wagging whenever the
+opportunity of ‘a crack’ presented itself. With a little cough by way of
+introduction, the patriarch began the conversation most affably:
+
+‘Frien’, I’m no a Gaelishioner myself; but my faither’s auntie married a
+Dumbarton chap, so that I’ve cousins on the edge of the Hielants. But
+you maybe canna speak the English?’ he interrupted himself to ask, led
+to do it by the stony suspicious look of the new-comer in return for his
+politeness.
+
+‘Ye’re wrang there,’ said Rory half-haughtily, half with a childish
+satisfaction; ‘I have the English.’
+
+‘That’s lucky, for the Gaelic is deein’ oot, though there’s mony a
+Hielant man an’ woman that could understand you in your ain tongue in
+the Sautmarket or the Gallowgate; still, ye ken, ye michtna licht on
+them without a deeficulty.’
+
+‘I telled ye I had the English,’ said the stranger, with dry offence in
+his tones.
+
+‘Weel, I said the better aff ye were the day,’ returned the other,
+declining to be offended in turn, or held at arm’s length. ‘Ye’ll hae
+come for the hairst? but ye’re fu’ soon, Tonalt.’
+
+‘My name’s not Tonalt,’ snarled the Highlander; ‘and I’m not for the
+hairst.’
+
+‘Ye’ll be seeking a porter’s job? that’s aye in season,’ persisted the
+untroubled questioner. ‘There was a rowth [plenty] o’ Hielant porters
+when I was a young lad; but we haena so mony now. We rear a breed o’ oor
+ain, I’m thinking;’ and he finished by a cackling laugh.
+
+Rory glared at his tormentor.
+
+‘I’m no a porter any more than a shearer,’ he spluttered indignantly.
+‘You’ll ask, perhaps, if I’m a beggar-man next. When I’m at home I’m
+Rory o’ the Shelties, no less, to Maclean of Cairnbreck; and I’m come to
+Glasgy on my ain private business.’
+
+‘I wish it may thrive,’ said the old man, still with a suspicion of
+mischief and mockery in his words. ‘Is it with the Lord Provost, or ony
+of the great shipbuilders or boilermakers? I was an engineer aince on a
+time mysel’, my lad; and I could work long hours at a stretch when
+orders were thrang and men scarce. Whiles, as I sit here doing naething,
+a dream comes ower me, and I hear the rattle of the locomotives, and the
+whiz of the steam-valves, and the swing and ring of the hammers, and
+it’s like the sweetest music I ever heard. But it never comes to you,
+man, I see by your face.’ His own old face, which had lighted up, lost
+its faint glow, and the former monkey-like mischief hovered again about
+its lines and furrows. ‘Your erran’ maun be to the sugar-trade or the
+cotton-mills, or aiblins to the whisky-shops to spier whether Campbelton
+or Glenlivat’s maist in favour.’
+
+Rory hunched rather than shrugged his shoulders, then suddenly rose up
+and walked away, lugging his knapsack.
+
+‘I think he has his fortune in that bit boxie,’ reflected the humble
+student of mankind sardonically, ‘but I jalouse he’s no better than a
+born natural. However, I maun hame to Jenny for my fower-hours, and syne
+it will be time for my bed.’
+
+Rory quitted the Green, where, in place of an inspiration coming to him,
+he had been badgered by an impertinent fool, old enough to be his
+grandfather--as old as his grandmother Morag when she left him the kit
+and the treasure which was to make his fortune. It was not his fortune
+yet which he carried in the soldier’s kit that might have been at the
+wars with some old Maclean, it was only the materials of which that
+fortune was to be made.
+
+He strayed up the Saltmarket and got into the Gallowgate. There, in the
+dirt and din and crush, he saw an occasional man with a Glengarry, or a
+bareheaded woman with a tartan plaid over her head, or round her
+shoulders, frequently binding a child to her--Highland fashion. The
+sight bore out the statement of Rory’s single acquaintance in Glasgow,
+that here were countrymen and women who might listen to his story and
+take an interest in his fortunes. But the stranger was bent on keeping
+his secret as far as he could, lest the sharers in it should steal a
+march on him and rob him of its price.
+
+As he wandered on, he noticed, side by side with the whisky-shops of
+which he had been told, so many milk-shops and dairies, that the days
+when the Cowcaddens received its name might have returned, and Glasgow
+again have had its staple article of produce in the milk which the
+students at the college and the brethren in the religious houses
+consumed. It might be the most baseless scandal that mountaindew flowed
+freely there, and as many crowns were cracked on Saturday night as in
+any city in the kingdom; while luckless wights, boasting that the moon
+would ‘bide a wee,’ before she served as their lantern to guide them
+home, staggered blindly into the brimming Clyde, and the waters closed
+sullenly over human loves and hates, hopes and fears.
+
+At the most crowded and noisy crossing, where waggons, carts and
+barrows, and a stray cab or two were in lively contest with the
+pedestrians, Rory was unexpectedly brought up by one of the women who
+still retained the tartan screen--though no longer the honourable curch
+of old custom:
+
+‘What pairt of the country are ye frae? It’ll no be Ballachulish? Ye’ll
+no ken M‘Leish--the auld sodger wi’ the wudden leg up at the big hoose,
+ye ken?’ She put her questions in rapid succession, without waiting for
+a separate answer, till she had opened out the whole budget.
+
+Rory, who was taken aback, while he was now both tired and faint in the
+unaccustomed scene, stared at her in silence with a dazed look. She was
+untidy, but not sordid or wretched in her dress. There was a certain
+lingering comeliness and kindly impulsiveness in her middle-aged face,
+though the lines had worn stronger, and the fresh colour grown mottled
+and hard. She broke the silence by a laugh at herself, in which there
+was no bitterness.
+
+‘I’m an auld fule,’ she said. ‘I daur say ye never heard of Ballachulish
+or Col M‘Leish--that’s the uncle who was gude to me when I was a
+mitherless bairn with a randy of a step-mother. I’ll no say she had
+nocht to complain o’ though, for I’ve grown a hantle wiser since I had a
+man and bairns of my ain. But, eh, I wuss I could hear tell o’ the auld
+man, gin he be in the land of the living yet, and how he’s farin’. They
+would mind his comforts up at the big hoose; but maybe, ye see, they’re
+a’ gane too. My man winna let me write--no that I’m a scholar, but I
+micht manage a scrape o’ the pen--only he threeps [insists] I micht
+bring a burden upon mysel’ and him, and there’s seven mooths o’ bairns
+to fill, and the farther he wull gang on the strike, though I were to
+lay the hairs o’ my head aneath his feet to prevent it. I’m aye speerin’
+and speerin’ whenever I can get the chance, but I never hear a word.’
+
+The speaker bestowed her confidence with the utmost candour on the
+bewildered listener, who had enough to do to protect himself and his
+knapsack from the jostling occasioned by the two stopping the way.
+
+‘Losh! man, can ye no speak?’ she asked in sudden surprise, not
+unmingled with consternation. ‘You’re a Hielanter, by the cut o’ ye. It
+is mony a day since I ran awa’ from Ballachulish, and my tongue has lost
+the Gaelic; but my ears can tak’ it in yet, gin it’s yeer only speech.’
+
+‘No,’ said Rory, piqued once more by not getting credit for the
+education he had acquired; ‘I have the English as well as any man in
+North Uist. But I div not know Ballachulish or any M‘Leish, and my head
+is bizzin’ a bit, what with comin’ aff the water and this confounded
+whirl.’
+
+‘Puir chiel!’ said the good-natured woman, with a quick change to
+patronizing pity in her accent, ‘ye’ll be strange to a muckle toon. I
+mind the feeling mysel’. Hae ye ony acquaintance here, or ony hole to
+gang to? If ye like, ye can come my gate--I live in the next street--and
+have a bite, till ye see what ye’re to do. Andry Sed--that’s my
+man--canna find faut wi’ a ca’, forbye he’s no at hame at this hour. Noo
+when I think o’t, ye’ll meet anither lad frae the hills, a ludger we’ve
+had for as gude as a week; but he’s bund for his maister’s place the
+morn. He’s weel-to-do, a credit to the North; he’s at the head of the
+kennels at Semple Barns--no less!’
+
+Roaming at random as he was in the deafening smothering city, without a
+clue to his object, Rory could not resist the frank invitation, though
+he was not guiltless of a suspicion that his countrywoman had
+penetrated somehow into the bowels of his knapsack, and was cherishing
+insidious designs upon its contents.
+
+Mrs. Sed or Seth’s house made up in heartiness and ease for what it
+lacked in dignity and refinement. That wet blanket, her Lowland husband,
+did not turn up to extinguish her Celtic hospitality. The bairns were at
+school or at their various trades, and so were not in the way to engross
+their mother’s energies. The ‘ludger,’ a profitable guest, crammed into
+a space cleared out for him, gave himself no airs, though he had
+attained the high degree of being the supreme authority over the dogs at
+Semple Barns. He was pleased with himself and with the world--this
+strapping, black (instead of red) headed, kilted man, an effusive,
+gossiping Highlander, a male example of the type to which Mrs. Seth
+belonged, with the same inclination to find his heart warm to any ‘John
+Hielantman,’ the rawer the better, whom he met among the crowds in the
+Low country.
+
+Under these benign influences, including whangs of a goat-milk kebbock,
+a ‘stack’ of oat-cakes, a newly-baked loaf, a couple of bottles of ale,
+and sundry tastings of the peat-reekiest whisky, Rory thawed
+perceptibly. He did not yet tell his errand, but he began to throw out
+dark hints of its importance, and to fish for such straws of information
+as he could gather from the talk of his companions, better versed than
+he was in the intricacies of Lowland and city life.
+
+‘You’ll be knowing most o’ the fine folk in Glasgow?’ he addressed Mrs.
+Seth insinuatingly.
+
+‘The deil’s in the man! is he makin’ fun of me?’ exclaimed his hostess,
+with a dash of anger in her tones; ‘or is his ignorance just past
+believing? What trade have I wi’ leddies in their carriages, or wi’
+gentlemen that dine aff cheeny and silver?’
+
+‘By name, mistress; I was only meaning by name!’ exclaimed the inquirer,
+in some alarm.
+
+‘Oo, I ken a feck [number] o’ them by name, whatever,’ she granted
+placably, the moment she was relieved from the disgrace of being laughed
+at by a ‘bogle’ like her new acquaintance. ‘I was in gude enough places
+when I was at service afore I took a man, and sair fashed I was with
+fikes [finical ways] about keeping mysel’ clean and tidy.’
+
+‘As if dirt didna bode [promise] luck, and there was no sic saw [saying]
+in braid Scots--not in Gaelic--as “the clartier the cosier.” [the more
+sluttish the warmer],’ interposed the keeper of the kennels, glancing
+down at the kilt he wore, which was by no means spotless, and having a
+fellow-feeling derived from similar trials.
+
+‘Deed, ay, Sandy Macnab, if ye’re no ower muckle up in the buckle [too
+proud] to be ca’d Sandy by a woman that kenned your mither--moreover,
+she was living in a land [a pile of building] in this very street, and
+you were a loon no bigger than wee Andry, who’s that dour he’ll reive
+his faither’s bannet some day. But what need they have made sic a stour
+aboot jappet tails [muddy skirts] or a wheen blades on a brat [spots on
+an apron] or bauchled shoon [shoes down at heel]!’ exclaimed Mrs. Seth,
+with a broad smile of superior wisdom.
+
+Then she began to tell of her great employers. ‘There were the Gilroys,
+where I was bairn’s-maid. He was in the hoose-pentin’ business, and he
+made a heap o’ money, and left her a rich widdy, to fling hersel’ awa’
+on a fule of a lad from Ayr. There were the Leishmans, where I was
+under-kitchen maid. He was a grosser with a grand connection, and his
+sons at college, and his dochters in furrin pairts for an eddication
+they would have been better without. And there were the Ores in the
+ship-chandler line, with a braw hoose at the West-End and a villy on
+the Clyde, where I gaed for a day at a time after I was married, when
+there was nae bairn in my arms, and they were oot o’ servants or
+changing them at term-time. But eh! man, it would take a year to gang
+owre the bare names o’ the big Glasgy folk.’
+
+Rory’s face fell a little, as if he were overpowered with the number of
+the great of the earth.
+
+‘But even among so mony,’ he said again, after a pause, ‘you micht come
+across certain titles.’
+
+‘Speak oot, man, among your country-folk and frien’s, and dinna gang for
+ever about the buss!’ the man of dogs adjured him. ‘Wha are you
+seekin’?--name him.’
+
+‘I div not want ony man,’ insisted Rory; ‘only I micht like to hear a
+name.’
+
+‘Weel, whatna name, and be hanged to ye for a sly, half-daft deevil!’
+Sandy Macnab muttered the last half of his sentence in his beard.
+
+Thus pressed, Rory took heart, stroked his long chin, and suggested,
+‘You’ll have heard of Mackinnon?’
+
+‘There’s a wale [choice] o’ Mackinnons,’ announced Mrs. Seth; ‘not that
+I pretend to be thick wi’ ony of them. But whilk Mackinnon are you
+after?’
+
+‘It micht be Mackinnon of Drysdale Haugh,’ admitted Rory, but, if
+possible, more reluctantly and dubiously than ever.
+
+‘You’re wrang there,’ Sandy Macnab contradicted him flatly. ‘I ken about
+Drysdale Haugh. It is the bleaching and dye-works that belong to the
+maister of Drysdale Ha’. He’s a friend of my maister’s. His young leddy
+dochter was biding with us at Semple Barns last week. She’s thrang
+[intimate] with my leddy. There’s no Mackinnon of Drysdale Haugh, but
+Drysdale of Drysdale Ha’ and Haugh an’ a’.’
+
+Mrs. Seth confirmed the tale.
+
+‘They are braw warks. I kenned a lass that married a bleacher; and I
+took my fit in my hand and gaed out and see’d her aince.’
+
+‘There micht have been mention of a Drysdale,’ said Rory cautiously,
+‘but it was ane Mackinnon of Drysdale Haugh that the concern was wi’.’
+
+‘It’s Drysdale the noo, onyway,’ maintained Sandy, unshaken in his
+testimony. ‘I’m as sure of that as that my head’s on my shoulders. But
+there’s Captain Mackinnon, a sodger lad, a frien’ of the young
+maister’s, if that will serve you.’
+
+Rory shook his head, but did not absolutely reject the suggestion.
+
+‘What will be his whole name?’
+
+‘How should I ken? Stop, it was half furrin, but I’ve heard it in the
+North; “Eneas,” “captain,” or “major,” I’m not pertikler about the
+milintary handle to the name. “Eneas Mackinnon”--I’ve read it on his
+valise. He kens a dug when he sees him, and he’s often doun at the
+kennels when he’s at Semple Barns.’
+
+‘No, it will not be Eneas,’ said Rory, letting his head fall
+disconsolately on his breast.
+
+‘Cheer up, auld shaver!’ cried the brotherly Sandy, using a term which
+was not strictly of Gaelic origin, but, to tell the truth, borrowed from
+the slang vocabulary of the young master of Semple Barns. Sandy punched
+Rory in the chest with a vigorous arm as he spoke. ‘You’ve hit on
+Drysdale Haugh, and that’s the main thing, I’m thinking, and Drysdale
+Ha’ is end on to Semple Barns. I’ll gie you a leg up for the sake of the
+North and auld lang syne. But you maun mind what ye’re after, and behave
+yoursel’, or I swear I’ll have naething to do with you. I’m an honest,
+‘sponsible man, and I’ll no fling aboot my maister’s money like
+chuckie-stanes [pebbles] without work in return. We’re wantin’ a
+dug-laddie, and you may do as weel as anither gin you’ll obey orders.
+You’re an able-bodied chiel enough, and you’ve as muckle wut as a
+hafflin callant [half-grown lad], I daur say. Whatever berth you’ve had
+in the Uist, ye’re no like to get a better offer here. You’ll be cheek
+for jowl with Drysdale Ha’, and can mak’ up your mind wha and what you
+want without starving in the street, or being coupet [overturned] back
+the road you came to your muirlan’ pariss--just when the minister, and
+the dominie [school-master], and the bethel [church officer] think
+they’re weel quit of you. Is’t a bargain?’
+
+‘Eh! you’ll be a fule gin you refuse,’ chimed in Mrs. Seth, with
+benevolent urgency. ‘Sandy Macnab’s a gude sort, and Semple Barns is a
+canny doon-sitting--even among the dugs. My laddies are wild to get a
+day there when the haws and the hips are ripe, and the gentlemen are oot
+with their guns, and there’s pappin’ o’ shot and drappin’ o’ birds on a’
+hands. That’s a’ very weel at a time, but the faither says the big
+toon’s the place to lippen [trust] to for laddies that want to mak’
+their way in the world, unless maybe they come from the hill-country and
+lo’e their freedom in the open air better than ony wage, and are as keen
+as the gentles on the sport, like Sandy there.’
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Rory of the Shelties accepted the good advice, not seeing how he could
+make any better of his quest, till he had tracked his game. He was
+promised one thing, he would be set down ‘end on’ to Drysdale Haugh.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+FRIENDS MEET AT BARLEY RIGGS.
+
+
+Barley Riggs was an old-fashioned country-house, left stranded among the
+bleach-fields of Drysdale Haugh. Instead of surroundings of woodland
+pasture or corn-land, it was encircled by acres of white webs,
+Turkey-red webs, or webs of divers colours, the aspect being something
+like that of a rainbow brought down from the skies and spread out on the
+dull earth.
+
+For convenience the house had been appropriated, at different times, by
+the different partners in the works. The original Drysdale had never
+dwelt in it; but the Mackinnons on their marriage had preferred it to
+the old farmhouse. Soon Gavin Mackinnon had ceased to take any active
+interest, or rather to do any active mischief, in the business; then
+Barley Riggs had been made over to his partner, Mr. Murray, a fussy,
+fault-finding man, whose continual meddling and rating had been little
+more to the purpose than Mackinnon’s helplessness. After Tam Drysdale’s
+purchase of the place, he had come there while Drysdale Hall was
+building round the nucleus of the farmhouse. Finally, Barley Riggs was
+again occupied by a Murray, though no longer as proprietor or tenant of
+the works, which had grown and spread till the buildings, vats,
+cylinders, and blocks were nearly doubled, like the men, women, and
+children who earned their bread by them, compared to what they had been
+five-and-twenty years before.
+
+Dr. Peter Murray had been born at Barley Riggs when it overlooked a far
+smaller colony of working-rooms, machinery, and working people’s
+cottages, when the ground-rainbow was but a handbreadth to the size it
+had reached now. He had come back to his first nest, as some men will,
+while others avoid their early homes with dogged dislike or nervous
+repugnance. He bore no grudge against the prosperity in which he had no
+share. He maintained that he had been so soon inured to the smell of
+chemicals that he rather liked it, though it was stronger now than in
+his young days.
+
+Dr. Peter had been bred a doctor, and had earned his little independence
+as a medical man at a foreign station. But he said that he could
+practise nowhere so well nor feel so much at ease with his patients as
+among the hands at the old works, of which he was now the doctor by the
+appointment of Tam Drysdale. Many of the people had stayed long enough
+for them to have been known to Dr. Peter in his and their calf-days. He
+could tell yet whom he had first bled, whose tooth he had tried his
+‘prentice hand at pulling, what baby had led the troop of his babies,
+so that it had been christened ‘Peter’ in compliment to him; and he had
+still the pleasure of bailing ‘Peter Murphy’ out of a Glasgow or local
+police court at least three times a year.
+
+Dr. Peter Murray was a philosopher whose character was a puzzle to Tam
+Drysdale, just as some of Tam’s idiosyncrasies bewildered Dr. Peter,
+though he understood his man much the better of the two. Yet the two men
+had not only a high esteem for each other--they had many points in
+common, such as their scientific bent, particularly with regard to
+chemicals, in which they had both dabbled more or less since their
+boyhood, and their humane feeling for their fellow-creatures,
+represented by the workpeople at Drysdale Haugh. But how Tam Drysdale
+could build a great showplace and pretend to be comfortable in it, and
+how Dr. Peter could be satisfied to dose away the end of his days in a
+shabby house without a single modern improvement, were samples of
+riddles which neither man could read to his satisfaction.
+
+Dr. Peter was not alone at Barley Riggs, though his wife was long dead
+and his family out in the world, married, and scattered far and wide,
+with one exception. This was his youngest child--the daughter
+Athole--who kept her father company, took care of his house, and was as
+pleased with her position as he could be with his.
+
+At Barley Riggs, Dr. Peter and his daughter practised what people are
+told in these days has all but gone out of the world--‘plain living and
+high thinking.’ They had to be frugal, for the income of the head of the
+house was not large, and he had determined to leave a sufficient
+provision for his unmarried daughter, though she had besought him with
+tears in her merry eyes not to stint himself on her account, in the
+modest indulgences he craved. She could work for herself at any time. He
+had taught her both how to be independent and how to be easily
+satisfied.
+
+But even if necessity had not been laid upon the Murrays to be frugal,
+their inclination pointed that way. They were disposed to be simple, not
+luxurious in their habits. They had so many higher enjoyments that the
+couple could hardly wait or stoop to occupy themselves much with the
+gratification of the senses. So long as books were left--they allowed
+themselves great scope in books, which are the finest and cheapest
+luxury--they did not object to faring simply. It did not trouble them
+that the furniture at Barley Riggs, which Dr. Peter had carried across
+the globe and back again, was almost as out of date and lawfully worn as
+that of the Miss Mackinnons in St. Mungo’s Square. Rivalling books, in
+the estimation of father and daughter, was life in every aspect--human
+life, animal life, plant life. It afforded them treasures beyond price.
+It was a divine problem they were never weary of seeking reverently to
+work out for themselves.
+
+The old-fashioned parlour at Barley Riggs was somewhat hard in angular
+forms and cold in neutral tints, such as were in fashion a good many
+years ago. The chairs and tables were of mahogany, black with age; the
+carpets and hangings, in colour, held chiefly by drabs and browns. There
+were here and there foreign touches which told of Dr. Peter’s long
+residence abroad--a cabinet of strange shells which he had gathered on a
+distant seashore; specimens of primitive pottery in dull red and thick
+yellow; a curious weapon or two hanging on the walls; but the place was
+marvellously homelike. It was a sitting-room lived in, where most things
+were for service and in constant use. It was scrupulously clean and
+bright, for cleanness and brightness not only cost little--they were
+conscientious duties and joys to Athole Murray, which she felt bound to
+discharge and cherish, and to hand on to her single handmaiden Jeannie,
+culled from the Drysdale Haugh working-girls. To have failed in these
+respects would have been to risk something by the admission of dust and
+gloom in spoiling a candidate for life’s blessings and immortal gains.
+
+Bookshelves, carved by Dr. Peter’s skilful hands, and full to running
+over, occupied every inch of vantage-ground, and relieved the homely
+style of the rest of the furniture. For though the volumes were not
+chosen on account of their binding, and were mostly well-worn, buff
+calf, and red and blue cloth, they did brighten up with soft and gay
+tints the Quaker-like groundwork. Summer and winter the room was never
+without green leaves and very often flowers, which Dr. Peter and Athole
+managed to rear in perfection, to the piqueing of the pride of the
+gardeners at Drysdale Hall, and even to the smothered mortification of
+Tam Drysdale. Tam was generous, but he desired as his right to have the
+best that money could produce; and was not money the engine of engines,
+even in the delicate domain of lilies and roses?
+
+Above all, the Barley Riggs parlour had a wealth of pets, remarkable,
+considering its narrow bounds and constant occupation by the family--a
+dog, a cat, and a kitten lived on the best of terms with a variety of
+birds. But these were only the indoor stock. Outside, pigeons fluttered
+on the roof of the house and on the window-sills; swallows built in the
+eaves; tame pheasants sat on the branches of the nearest trees; a couple
+of hedgehogs scuttled away across the walks. In the paddock a goat and
+its kid were tethered; and Dr. Peter’s pony, and an old Shetland pony,
+which Athole had ridden as a child, roamed at their own sweet will,
+sharing the pasture with an Alderney cow and her calf. A large family of
+poultry looked out from behind the wire-net fencing their poultry-yard,
+like nuns from the other side of a grating. The whole little territory
+was teeming with life, and the occupants took the keenest interest in
+it all--down to the butterflies and beetles among the wallflowers and
+irises, the caterpillars on the cabbage-leaves, the bees on the thyme.
+If it be true that
+
+    ‘He prayeth best who loveth best
+     All things both great and small,’
+
+then surely Dr. Peter and his daughter Athole prayed well.
+
+He was a long, lean man, very brown and very grey, whose coats had a
+trick of looking shabby, yet who had something positively noble in his
+air, he was so entirely beyond being touched by circumstances, so
+sufficient for himself and those he belonged to, so born to confer
+benefits of their kind on all with whom he came in contact.
+
+Athole was very like him in being thin and brown and dark-haired, as he
+had been before he became grey. Her features were refined, but so
+irregular as to be positively bizarre. Her chief beauty lay in her grey
+eyes. For reasons of her own, Athole Murray was fond of dressing in grey
+of all shades, from slate to silver, in linen or silk occasionally, and
+frequently in woollen stuffs with the texture shifting to suit the
+different seasons, and with names significant of demureness and
+retirement from the world--Carmelite nun’s cloth; and yet nobody could
+be less demure or nun-like than Athole Murray. She was a busy, cheerful
+girl, a little over twenty. She had an amount of humour and fun, liable
+to mislead her neighbours with regard to her earnestness, which made
+men’s hearts glad, and cost her some pains to keep within reasonable
+bounds.
+
+On the evening of an April day, Athole was sitting in the parlour at
+Barley Riggs, at a little table which was peculiarly hers, diligently
+drawing designs for the calico-printers. She had lithe, capable hands
+which could not be idle. They had been early trained to a variety of
+occupations. Athole could not only sew all manner of needle-work, cook
+daintily, clean deftly: she could carve in wood better than her father
+could. She could etch like a second-rate etcher; she could paint on
+china, not merely for exhibitions of amateur performances, but so
+cleverly that a china manufacturer of some reputation had offered her
+regular work and good wages. She had compounded with her father for his
+persistence in making a provision for her future, by taking upon her a
+share of the present household expenses, and supplying the necessary
+funds from a neat little income which she gained by being the most
+original designer employed at the Drysdale Haugh Works.
+
+Athole was in grey as usual, but she had a blue knot where her little
+white collar met the neck of her gown, and companion blue knots where
+her sleeves terminated above her slim round wrists. She had told her
+father in confidence--these two were great friends--that were it not for
+the hindrance they would offer to her going out to look after the beast
+tribe, and the temptation the fashion might present to Jeannie, their
+handmaiden, she (Athole) would sport another pair of blue bows in her
+shoes. She was entitled to compensation for always appearing as ‘a grey
+lady’ when all the colours of all the Drysdale Haugh dye-vats were
+perpetually before her eyes.
+
+What made her do so? It was so oblivious and so like a man to ask. Of
+course familiarity bred contempt. Of course she chose to be out of the
+common in plainness, since she could not witch the world with splendour
+like Clary Drysdale; and it would not suit her complexion to be always
+in pink like Eppie. Did he not know green was the complement of red, and
+if she figured in any tinge of rose-colour she would come out as the
+Green Woman. She would be solicited by half a dozen caravans to give
+them the benefit of her unique charms for Glasgow Fair. How would he
+like that?
+
+No, grey was her safeguard. Besides, grey had nothing to lose, and did
+not fade, and many cheap materials were considerately dyed that colour.
+It was her duty as a sensible woman, especially in relation to their
+handmaid Jeannie, to set before her an example of economic and rational
+clothing, not unbecoming under the difficult circumstances. It was
+little she could do; but, like the man who would not wear a miller’s hat
+though it cost him his life, she was prepared to make a stand--to go to
+the scaffold if she were sent there in a righteous cause, in a protest
+against the extravagance--whether in art-colours or in aniline dyes, in
+straight lines or in puffs and folds--of her sex, in the matter of dress
+in this generation.
+
+As Athole drew in her particular window, her father entertained a
+visitor. The stranger’s presence did not disturb the young lady in her
+occupation, not even though that stranger was young Tam Drysdale, the
+son of the master of the calico printing-works. She did not stop her
+work. She made no pretence of concealing the pattern on which she was
+engaged. She did not even go on stiffly and awkwardly, as if she ignored
+a spectator.
+
+She asked him once to look at what she was doing. ‘Are you acquainted
+with this geometrical flower, Mr. Tom? I am afraid it “never grew,” like
+the tree in the city arms.’
+
+When he answered, a little put out by her appeal, that he had no doubt
+her design was an excellent one for the purpose, she knew better than he
+did, she acquiesced quietly with a laugh that had some pleasure and no
+annoyance in it. ‘I dare say I do. I have worked for eighteen months in
+this way, and if I have not failed in my reckoning, I have done this
+pattern with variations twenty-two times. No, don’t pity me, I beg,’
+she interrupted young Tam as he prepared to address her with a
+portentously grave face. ‘I am not an object of pity. I am not a
+struggling artist nipped in the bud, or a martyr to the wants of a
+numerous family. I think that I am neat-handed, have some notion of
+colour, and some idea of what a calico-pattern ought to be, if you will
+allow me to say so; but that is the extent of my capacity. And it is not
+a hardship in other respects to work like this for two or three hours a
+day from choice for liberal pay, considering the nature of the work. It
+rather soothes than wearies me. My father has trained me to do something
+of the kind to keep me in order, lest I should get so audacious that I
+should not be fit to live with.’
+
+She told him this easily and composedly, but for the twinkle in her grey
+eyes. It did not enter into her head that there was anything unworthy in
+itself or disparaging to her in working for pay--working for his
+father. She was more than his equal by birth, for the Murrays were of
+gentle descent as far back as they could count, and his equal by
+education, though she did not dress in purple and fine linen, or fare
+sumptuously every day. She was his mother’s and sisters’ friend, though
+Clary, with her own engagements, did not come half so often to Barley
+Riggs as Eppie came. It did not seem to Athole Murray that any drawing
+of patterns, though it had been ever so repugnant to her, while, as it
+chanced, she liked it, could alter these facts.
+
+Young Tam took one part of her speech seriously, and answered her,
+standing, looking a protesting giant by her side:
+
+‘I beg your pardon, Miss Murray; I was not going to pity you. I agree
+with Goethe that life is earnest, and work, so that it is real, is about
+the best thing we have. I only pity the workers who have no advantage
+from their work, or, if they have, advantage of the grossest kind or in
+the scantiest degree. I pity still more the men and women who think
+they are profiting by toil that is done by proxy, while they are simply
+pampering what is lowest in their own natures and reducing themselves to
+the _rôle_, if not of brutes, of fools and dolls.’
+
+Young Tam spoke with bitterness, but with freedom, as he could not do at
+home. He was in another atmosphere--more congenial, nay, with a
+fascination for him, widely as his hearers differed from him.
+
+Dr. Peter took the trouble to contradict his visitor most decidedly, to
+remonstrate with him strongly. The elder man’s life-long friendship with
+Tam senior, in spite of their divergences, warranted the step. Besides,
+Dr. Peter had known young Tam more or less for years, entertained a
+considerable regard for him, and would not let him go far wrong if he
+(Dr. Peter) could help it.
+
+‘Come, come, young Tam Drysdale, you are going a great deal too far.
+Communism--not to say Nihilism--has been proved rank folly over and
+over again. If you think so little of wealth, ease, and luxury, why need
+you grudge them to the favoured few, and cry out like a bairn or a
+fanatic against the want of them in the many?’
+
+‘Well, sir,’ said Tam, with a grim smile, ‘you are about the last person
+I should have expected to find upholding riches, with the power they are
+supposed to confer and the sacrifices they entail.’
+
+Dr. Peter shrugged his narrow, stooping, student’s shoulders. ‘I suppose
+that is a hit at me because I have not made a fortune with my lancet and
+stethoscope. To tell the truth, I do not greatly miss it. Athie and I
+can get along famously with what we have; we’ll not say how much or how
+little, lest I should make you open your eyes, Maister Tam. But I don’t
+want to compel all the world to have our tastes; the uniformity would be
+inconvenient, to say the least, and a trifle tiresome.’
+
+‘You don’t mean to say that you approve of keeping some noses at the
+grindstone in order that the same feature in other people may be cocked
+in the air,’ said Tam satirically--‘that you, who are a medical man and
+expound the laws of health, give your consent to cellars and garrets on
+the one hand, to match palatial mansions on the other? You are something
+of a reformer, and you are a church-going man. Are you satisfied as a
+patriot and a Christian with the physical, moral, and intellectual
+condition of the two great classes in a commercial centre like Glasgow?’
+
+‘How so? In what light?’ asked Dr. Peter cautiously.
+
+‘Take the well-to-do,’ young Tam explained. ‘They are never weary
+boasting what they can get for their money. They lay themselves out to
+spend at the greatest rate. They glory in the reversal of their early
+practice--not merely where a little cheap refinement and higher
+education are concerned. They turn their backs on the past, and load
+themselves with burdens too heavy to be borne, of altered habits, late
+hours, unpalatable arrangements, uncongenial associates. They make asses
+of themselves in dress, at table, with their hunters and hounds, their
+plate, their pictures and books--all for the sake of showing what fine
+gentlemen they have grown, when the truth is they were a deal nearer
+being gentlemen, if gentlemen were true men, in the rough guise in which
+they started.’
+
+‘You are going a great deal too far, Tam,’ repeated Dr. Peter severely;
+‘but what of the other class?’ very much in the tone in which the
+prisoner at the bar interrupted the summing-up of the judge with ‘It’s a
+lie, my lord; but go on.’
+
+‘Do I need to tell the poor men’s doctor, who attends them more for love
+than for money, what their case is like?’ asked young Tam, with his
+voice softening a little. ‘While they are toiling in the sweat of their
+brows, without hope of rising to greater ease and leisure, their hearts
+are eaten through and through with envy at the distant sight and sound
+of good things which the audience is too ignorant to understand are no
+better than fairy gifts--glittering pinchbeck and spun glass. They are
+worse--heavy clogs to weigh down men and women unaccustomed to lives of
+parade and sensuous indulgence, cankers to destroy the bravest manliness
+and the sweetest womanliness. The working class, with their desperate
+strikes, their fits of starvation and their fits of excess, their gross
+materialism, their worn-out bodies and trampled-down souls, their
+conceited atheism--you know better what they are than I do, Dr. Peter
+Murray.’
+
+‘I should think so, lad--I should hope so; and the rich too, for I am
+happy to say I have some of them for my patients and friends also,
+though it may lower me in your estimation to hear it. Young Tam, you
+are flying in the face of Providence, you are counting the spots in the
+sun, and challenging its lustre. There are such things as faults that
+lean to virtue’s side, and vanities which are but the dust of the earth
+that gathers on some of the noblest works of God and man. No man, be he
+rich or poor, is bound to be a slave either to his gains or his
+deprivations. Tam Drysdale, you have no more respect for the poor than
+for the rich. You do not honour all men. What do you take the poor for,
+that you should speak of them as if they were debased helots, instead of
+honest men and women who call no man master, in one sense? Every sturdy
+dyer and patient bleacher, every hammerer and weaver and mill girl among
+them, has his or her destiny in his or her hands, in all essentials as
+much as you or I have. A poor man or woman can be as decent and
+intelligent as you or I, with the intelligence of mother-wit, which is
+infinitely higher than the thin veneer of education that, to tell the
+truth, sometimes covers up and wastes what finer grace and natural
+polish the wood ever had.’
+
+Tam looked taken aback, and remained silent, while Dr. Peter waxed more
+and more indignant.
+
+‘The times are hard, indeed, and things have come to a pretty pass, if a
+respectable working man or woman--it is all one--who is not a fool and
+can practise self-denial, like a man or like a woman, cannot earn
+independence. Such independence means comfort and the power of showing
+you a bien [comfortable] house and a canty [cheery] fireside, whose
+owner has no cause to grow green with envy at the masters, no call to
+ruin himself or herself in a wild attempt to pull them down and reign in
+their stead. No doubt, trials are rained on some poor sinners; it
+happens so occasionally, and shuts our mouths. But we cannot see the
+end from the beginning, and even then the back is made for the burden.
+No, spare your pity, sir, or pity yourself,’ ended Dr. Peter, flinging
+himself back in his chair.
+
+‘Never mind him, Mr. Tom.’ Athole looked up from her drawing to come to
+the rescue. ‘You have rubbed him the wrong way, as I often do. Nobody is
+to pity, rich or poor, except yourself, father--is that not it?’
+
+‘Bairn, I see a great deal to pity, and I have no objection to my
+neighbours sharing that luxury, if they find it such. But I will not
+have wholesale condemnation, or stock of abuse in the guise of pity.
+Maister Tam, you who are fresh from the schools should know a trick
+worth two of that. Surely the philosophy of all the centuries has found
+out something better than to keep on pitting the classes against each
+other, and setting them by the ears when their strength is in the
+union--not of the men alone, but of the men and the masters, in making
+the best and not the worst of each other.’
+
+‘Then you judge trades’ unions to be a mistake in social economy? You
+condemn them in the face of all they have got for the people, which was
+only their just right?’ said young Tam, eager to catch at the inference
+and nail down his adversary.
+
+‘I neither judge nor condemn. The question is beyond me, and may be
+beyond you too, if you will allow me to say so,’ Dr. Peter excused
+himself, with a comical twinkle replacing the gleam of indignation in
+his eyes. ‘There are great difficulties here, as there are in every
+human problem. However, I can see that many, both rich and poor, are
+doing their best, and I for one won’t quarrel with them, though they do
+not find the solution at once, or blunder in the search as their fathers
+have done before them. I have seen great changes and improvements in my
+day.’
+
+‘Of what kind?’ inquired young Tam dubiously.
+
+‘For instance, here at Drysdale Haugh, I remember when there were few
+cylinders in comparison with the blocks. The work was ten times harder
+than it is now, and took ten times as long to do. There was no thought
+then of machines to relieve the men who had to keep and turn the yarn on
+the rods, hanging for hours over the cisterns of boiling dye liquor. As
+for the houses or hovels for the hands, you might have had occasion for
+your attacks in those days, Maister Tam. I tell you that your father has
+been nothing less than a benefactor to his folk, and I’m proud to say
+you’ll not find better quartered, more fairly and liberally treated
+workpeople on this side of Glasgow. I only hope you may do as much for
+your neighbours when your time comes.’
+
+‘I don’t wish to smother my father’s honour,’ said young Tam, with a
+faint smile and a slight increase of colour. ‘There is one thing, he
+knew by experience what the people lacked. What I regret is that he was
+not content to remain one of them, to share the joys and sorrows he was
+so well acquainted with--to raise them if you will, but not to break off
+from them and put himself into a position which is not natural to him.
+Well, it sits ill upon him, and makes him lose his proper dignity. It
+brings out what is least admirable in him--there can be no disrespect in
+saying that,’ observed young Tam with some ingenuousness; ‘and it
+exposes him to the ridicule of people who are immeasurably his
+inferiors.’
+
+‘If they are his inferiors, why need anybody heed? Fools will laugh
+whether you give them cause or not--not that I see anything to laugh at
+in your father, or any laughter going. He is one in a thousand, who has
+not only done well by himself, but by all around him. He is held in very
+high and general respect, as he deserves to be, I would have you to
+understand, Maister Tam. As for not rising above his original footing,
+or not taking the benefit of the labour of his hands, supposing he holds
+it to be a benefit, and not occupying the post he is fitted for and
+called to fill, you are speaking arrant nonsense. You would have castes,
+in hard and fast lines, in Christian England as in heathen India. Fine
+sources of progress they have proved in the East! You would remove one
+of the greatest inducements for ordinary men to struggle and endure, and
+bring the work of their lives to perfection.’
+
+‘And if every man acted as he spoke,’ retorted Tam, ‘you should be a
+court physician at least.’
+
+‘I square no man’s life by my rule. If I have found that my tastes are
+all of a homely kind, it is my own look-out. In point of fact,
+artificial and complicated forms interfere with what I like and can do.
+Athole and I flourish best on a moderate income, in a plain old house,
+with a single servant-lass.’
+
+‘Speak for yourself, father,’ asserted Athole from her coign of vantage.
+‘How do you know that I would not prefer to be a Turkish sultana, or an
+Arcadian shepherdess, or the principal of a Ladies’ College? But there,
+speak of angels--I see Mr. Drysdale and Eppie--her visit is to the
+Newfoundland puppy--at the gate.’
+
+There was a little commotion of welcome as old Mr. Drysdale and Eppie
+entered Barley Riggs house, in which young Tam Drysdale fell into the
+background. His father’s eyes followed him, and then glanced with a
+quick suspicion from his son to Athole. Was there any loadstone here
+which drew Tam from his useless studies and might serve to make or mar
+him, independent of his other vagaries? No; it could not be a brown,
+shilpet, plainly-dressed lassie, working as a designer, though she was a
+lady born and bred--auld Tam did not deny that. Tam never addressed
+Athole, even in giving her his views on printed calico patterns, without
+calling her ‘Miss Murray, mem,’ paying the respect due to her in double
+measure, as it were. Still, though she had not forfeited her young
+ladyhood in his eyes, he was alive to the light in which many people
+would regard her; he fully recognised her disqualifications as a
+possible match for his son. She would have no more than a penny or two,
+if Dr. Peter could scrape together that for her, and young Tam might
+have a fine girl like Clary, with as good a tocher. If ‘Sir Jeemes’ had
+owned a daughter, Tam might even have pretended to her. No, he could not
+be so blind and besotted. Dr. Peter’s daughter was a good lassie and a
+clever lassie, and auld Tam rather liked her on his own account; but she
+was not for young Tam. His eccentricity could not go the length of
+fancying her.
+
+Eppie was come after the Newfoundland dog, and without the smallest
+disguise she announced her errand, drew Dr. Peter out to the stable, and
+was presently seen in the distance hugging a black fluffy ball in her
+arms; while her companion, nothing loth, for both of the Eppies were
+pets of his, marshalled her round the paddock, introducing her in
+succession to every member of his numerous family.
+
+Auld Tam remained where he was. In spite of his boast the night before
+of being able to walk to Glasgow and back, he was tired enough to be
+glad to rest in one of the heavy, roomy Barley Riggs parlour chairs.
+Athole was under the necessity of bearing him and young Tam company.
+
+She had no objection; she had as great a liking for the elder Tam as her
+father had for Mrs. Drysdale and Eppie. She seemed to know exactly what
+suited him, as if she belonged to him. She brought him with her own
+hands, in spite of his protest, such a glass of draught ale and such a
+water biscuit as he had been wont to refresh himself with twenty years
+before, and still liked from old association. While he drank the ale and
+munched the biscuit, to his evident solace, she chatted with him about
+the weather, about her flowers and his, admitting herself fairly beaten
+in polyanthuses before she claimed the superiority in white primroses.
+She gave him her lively report of the pattern-room, and the good effect
+with which the last designs were likely to come out. It was she who,
+before the others returned, introduced the subject which lay very near
+Tam Drysdale’s heart. This was certain experiments he was making in
+mordants and pastes. He grew radiant in describing the improvements he
+hoped to bring about in dyeing and printing, until young Tam was stirred
+up to ask a question or two, and to offer a sensible suggestion. As a
+boy he had gone considerably beyond the ordinary boyish stage of
+dabbling in chemicals, and threatened to blow himself and his family to
+atoms in gratifying his taste. There had been a time when young Tam, to
+his proud father’s delight, had shown decided promise in what might have
+been called the paternal field. The son had mortified the father deeply
+by abandoning the laboratory for the library; but to-night, with Athole
+Murray for a link between the two men, young Tam testified some of his
+old interest in the subject.
+
+Eppie came in crying, ‘Father, I have seen such a heap of beasts;’ but
+auld Tam did not heed her. The fascination of the theme entrapped Dr.
+Peter also. The three men engaged in a conversation in which the words
+‘retort,’ ‘deposit,’ ‘affinity,’ ‘discharge,’ ‘hold fast,’ were for ever
+coming to the surface.
+
+Athole fell out of the talk, apparently without being missed. She set
+herself to entertain Eppie, who was too much entranced with her baby
+Newfoundland to stand in need of amusement.
+
+The discussion was not ended when the party of Drysdales left together.
+For the moment the division between the father and the son had been so
+bridged across by the sympathetic warmth of the interest evoked, that
+auld Tam as he walked away plucked young Tam by the sleeve in a way he
+had not done for months. The action was for the better emphasizing of an
+additional reason for the course the experimenter was taking in order to
+get an unsurpassable tint of orange, which by a junction with an
+unapproachable blue was to lead to an unassailable green; but the motive
+did not signify, the result was everything.
+
+Athole Murray smiled as her eyes followed the departing figures. Then
+she came and stood by her father’s side on the hearthrug and assailed
+him for an opinion.
+
+‘Don’t you think, father, that some day young Tam Drysdale will go heart
+and soul into his father’s business; that he will pull down Drysdale
+Hall and build it up bigger and grander, or have another place in finer
+taste, which will cost a great deal more, and take twice the pains to
+create its delicate harmonies? and don’t you imagine that, earnest as
+Goethe found life, young Tam will take heart before all is done, and
+dance the night out and the morning in, as many times as there are hairs
+in his head, without regard to the excusable occasions of Clary’s and
+Eppie’s weddings.’
+
+‘I don’t know about the dancing and the building, Athie; but the young
+fellow will ripen, and lose his sour flavour, and be wholesome social
+food in the course of nature, if he does not contrive to make a mess of
+himself and his life in the meantime, before they have righted
+themselves. He is in a transition state and a morbid frame, disgusted
+with himself and the world. He has come into auld Tam’s gains without
+going through the process of earning them, and he cannot digest them.’
+
+‘Are they so ill to digest?’ inquired Athole incredulously.
+
+‘So it seems. Young Tam has approached the question of employers and
+employed without practical knowledge, and he is all at sea. Yet it is to
+the honour of the lad that he will not leave the question alone. But he
+sees every discrepancy magnified and distorted. He has an honest regard
+for his father and mother--that thrawn chiel [cross fellow]--you heard
+what he said of auld Tam; but that is just why it galls him past bearing
+to see them make themselves ridiculous. Between you and me they do it
+oftener than I like to think when poor Tam brags and blaws [boasts and
+puffs] of his fields and gardens, his sheep and cattle, his table and
+his cellar, his man-servants and his maid-servants, and brings forward
+their prices; and when she mince-minces her words, and tries some
+“lang-nebbet” [long-nosed] name that trips her up. I do not wonder at
+young Tam. I could shake the kindly auld fules myself.’
+
+‘But young Tam need not see it,’ maintained Athole, with her head held
+high and her eyes alight, ‘I should like him a thousand times better if
+he were deaf and blind, if his honour for his father and mother were a
+shield to screen them from his own over-critical eyes, as well as his
+neighbours’ carping tongues.’
+
+‘That is a woman’s way of thinking,’ said Dr. Peter, at the same time
+giving his daughter’s hair a not disapproving stroke. ‘All feeling and
+no reasoning--all heart and no head. Some people would call it “high
+fantastic,” but I never object to a good woman’s flights--least of all
+am I likely to do it here, where I profit by them, being a father
+myself, my dear.’
+
+‘But, father,’ interrupted Athole quickly and indignantly, ‘you are not
+like that.’
+
+‘I can only say I have not been tempted,’ he answered, with a laugh.
+‘But remember it is not easy for young Tam when, as he hints, there are
+people mean enough to “sorn” [trespass] on the hospitality of Drysdale
+Hall, and jeer and laugh at its master and mistress. I take it that men
+are different from women here--I’ll not say that it is to their gain,
+with sharper eyes, harder to blind, rougher tongues that go straighter
+to the mark, and a greater tendency to use the scalpel though they cut
+into their own flesh.’
+
+‘He knows how good and kind they are, and that should be enough for
+him,’ said Athole stoutly. ‘I admit they are laughable sometimes; they
+force me to laugh to their faces, and then I am “black ashamed” of my
+heartlessness, and could bite my tongue out if I have said anything.’
+
+‘But he does not laugh, lassie; he leaves that to Miss Clary, if any of
+them is guilty of such light laughter. Ay, if you must do either in the
+circumstances, it is a mighty deal better to greet [weep] if you are a
+woman, and gloom [frown] if you are a man, than to mock with
+the mockers, as it is safer--taking a certain parable into
+consideration--though I grant you less pleasant, to be disgusted than to
+be charmed with yourself.’
+
+‘Young Tam will never be half so nice as his father,’ said Athole, still
+betraying tokens of discontent, while she arrived at her conclusion
+meditatively. ‘I’m fond of auld Tam.’
+
+‘So am I, Athole. But young Tam, with all the expense bestowed on his
+education, has not had the same chance; and he’s a chip of the old block
+in many respects. He may be led, but he will not be driven; yet that
+auld fule Tam, who knows himself, and ought to know his son, seeks to
+drive him.’
+
+‘He’s so horribly self-conscious; he has mounted such a very tall
+hobby-horse, and he rides it so pragmatically and unmercifully. He
+rejoices so in his superiority and consequent martyrdom; he is so
+ridiculously young in his grievances.’
+
+‘That is a fault which will mend every day,’ her father told her
+hopefully. ‘I think of many of the young men of his class, of their
+entire engrossing satisfaction with their pretty selves, their bit toy
+yachts and hunters, club dinners, and dances such as you propose for
+young Tam Drysdale’s heavy head and exercised heart. I reckon up these
+gentlemen’s small ambitions of being noticed by the country gentry, of
+pushing themselves up to marry into the higher ranks, and have wives as
+silly as themselves, that despise their commercial partners. And the
+conclusion I come to is that such fellows are but a parcel of spoilt
+boys compared to a lad, ill-conditioned you may say as yet, but who has
+the making of a man in him. More than that, you must remember, Athole,
+all that I have mentioned is innocent enough, but there are other
+ways--not to be spoken of to ears like yours, while it is right that
+you should know of their existence. There are means of selfishly
+indulging in prosperity, and wildly rioting in the days of a man’s
+youth, that end--as surely as the rivers run to the sea--in the foul
+wallowing of swine in the mire, or in the wickedness of devils. Contrast
+young Tam and his troubles with such rich men’s sons and their brutal
+experiences, and his father and mother may thank God for the day that he
+was born to them.’
+
+The conversation had grown too serious to be prolonged, and it had taken
+a turn which rendered it impossible for Athole to contradict her father
+further.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+LIEUTENANT ENEAS MACKINNON DUE IN ST. MUNGO’S SQUARE.
+
+
+The Miss Mackinnons were as loth to deprive their grand-nephew of his
+military title as Mrs. Drysdale had shown herself. Indeed, they
+persisted, in spite of his protests, in giving it to him whenever they
+spoke of him. Even among themselves it was as often the ‘Lieutenant’ as
+‘Eneas.’
+
+It would have been hard to deprive the old ladies of one of the scanty
+rewards of a step for which both he and they paid dearly--how dearly in
+his case they had happily no idea. It would have gone far to break their
+hearts if they had guessed that he had cause to rue sorely the boyish
+delusion and the family pride--to which they had ministered--that had
+ended by placing him in his present position. It was at once a great
+deal less and a great deal more than what was in the Miss Mackinnons’
+eyes the gallant calling of a gentleman, which transferred him instantly
+to the society of his equals, and raised him triumphantly above all
+further difficulty, with nothing to do save ‘wear his regimentals,’
+which, to their great regret, the grand-aunts almost never saw him do;
+‘go where her Majesty and his country ca’ed him,’ which as yet had only
+been to a tame routine of town and country quarters, not even to any
+corner of Africa; ‘fecht like a hero,’ for which there was literally no
+opportunity; and wait for promotion which was never likely to come.
+
+The abolition of the purchase system was not calculated to be of any
+service to Lieutenant Eneas Mackinnon. He had neither special military
+ability, nor spirit, nor heart to urge him to study theoretically the
+art of war, go in for a series of competitive examinations, and come out
+with a new brevet rank from every encounter. And if it were possible for
+him to remain thirty years a lieutenant, like Havelock, it was certainly
+very improbable that he would complete the similitude, and end by dying
+a victorious general. He would need to be as lucky as Sir Frizzle
+Pumpkin to accomplish such a feat, for though Eneas was brave enough not
+to be a disgrace to his Trojan namesake, he had no head for organizing
+and manœuvring bodies of men--not even on a chess-board. He was a great
+improvement on his father, but was still a reflection of the paternal
+nature in its slowness and heaviness. The best thing about him was his
+honesty and modesty, the ingrained attributes of a real, not an
+imitation, gentleman, which he had acquired somehow from some far-off
+Mackinnon. He was true, he was unassuming in place of being pompous
+like Gavin Mackinnon.
+
+Eneas was silent and long-suffering in the thorny path of poverty on
+which he had been launched among richer men, without the smallest hope
+of bettering himself. He was as inoffensive a member of a family as Lady
+Semple had described him, winning sympathy and a certain amount of
+respect by the magnanimity which caused him to bear his own burden
+without inflicting it on the shoulders of another. The forbearance might
+be due to pride as much as to generosity or veritable humility; still,
+it was a respectable quality, and one to be thankful for. He was one of
+the passive young men of the period, who looked on and smiled a little
+languidly--even without complaint changed his course in a leisurely
+manner, to suit that of his neighbour, and did not do more than shrug
+his shoulders at what went against the grain with him. He formed a
+complete contrast to young Tam Drysdale, who was naturally of the
+aggressive order, in danger of doing something desperate, in the rash
+arrogance of youth, which burns to set right the world that has been
+rolling on its path thousands of years before he came into being.
+
+Eneas Mackinnon, as he was more of a gentleman, was also handsomer than
+any of his race who had appeared for two generations. The clumsy
+features of his great-aunts had in him taken a symmetrical mould. He was
+less large for a man than they were for women; still, he was
+broad-shouldered and long-limbed enough for a soldier. He had borrowed
+from the plebeian Craigs chestnut instead of tow-coloured hair, with
+blue eyes, which had a certain bucolic mildness and softness in them. As
+he stood in a doorway or on a flight of steps, or leant his back against
+a tree on a lawn, or propped himself upon a table or the arm of a couch,
+he was a little like a statue of a fine phlegmatic Englishman, but it
+was a statue which would have done the sculptor fair credit.
+
+The Lieutenant, supposing he ever became a general, would be a general
+without a penny of private fortune, who must at the same time support
+the increased dignity of his rank. He must continue a bachelor, and by
+so doing restrict his expenses to his personal wants, ‘collaring’ the
+increase of income through the grades of captain, major, etc., to
+furnish him, and him alone, with an increase of comforts proportionate
+to the advance of age and the infirmities of age. If he permitted
+himself to marry, perhaps to bring into the world a small clamorous
+family, in addition to an exacting wife, he would be as painfully put to
+it, in spite of his laurels--as pressed, worried, stinted--as
+threadbare--as miserably anxious for the future not only of himself, but
+of those connected with him, as any light-pursed subaltern writhing
+under the yoke of bondage he had unwittingly assumed. This was an age
+of luxurious living and regardless extravagance, a commercial age, when
+a pseudo-working man like Tam Drysdale of Drysdale Hall set up an
+establishment fit for a laird of many acres or a peer of the realm, and
+left gentlemen and officers far behind.
+
+Eneas Mackinnon submitted to destiny with the fatalism of the Gael. His
+regiment was now quartered at Dumbarton. He was often in Glasgow as well
+as at Semple Barns. The last opportunity had been decidedly a boon to
+him. The former was the occasion of his being extensively taken out in
+the richest, and sometimes the vulgarest houses of certain gorgeous
+circles in Glasgow. He had availed himself of the chance, even while he
+rebelled in a stony fashion against the infliction, as a lawful means of
+relieving his over-taxed resources. He despised himself for it, but what
+could he do?--especially if he were to bestow small gifts on the
+‘aunties,’ who were certainly growing more penurious every day, and
+beginning to deny themselves the very necessaries of life in an
+exasperating manner, not uncommon with old women, he had heard. Better
+that he should stand being fêted by pipe-makers and retired
+spirit-dealers, and have to hobnob with their bumptious sons and dance
+with their bouncing daughters, than that he should run into debt and
+shoot himself, and bring his particular tabbies to the grave with horror
+at the catastrophe. As yet the notion that he might some day have to
+sell himself bodily by marrying one of these tochered lasses to keep
+body and soul together, only loomed before his imagination as a dark
+necessity in the distance.
+
+The young man groaned inwardly over his visits to St. Mungo’s Square, as
+he groaned over most of the acts of his purgatorial life. To his credit
+he paid the visits with tolerable frequency and regularity, though
+latterly he had been plagued by an unaccountable rule established by
+Miss Janet, that he should always send them an intimation of his coming
+beforehand.
+
+‘Your auntie Meye is getting frail, you see,’ Miss Janet had the excuse,
+‘and a wee thing starts her; and me or your auntie Betheye might be out
+of the road and miss you, which would be a thousand peeties.’
+
+So, with one more of his many smothered groans, Lieutenant Eneas was in
+the habit of perpetrating small notes and despatching them as _avant
+couriers_ every time that he descended on St. Mungo’s Square.
+
+‘It is making such a fuss about a fellow’s movements, and one feels as
+if one ought to bring handsome presents,’ he reflected, glancing
+deprecatingly at the little parcel of gloves--women always wanted
+gloves--his own size suited ‘the aunties.’ His cast-off Hexhamians would
+have been better than new pairs, for the last had been surreptitiously
+exchanged as misfits, by Miss Bethia, for more of the yarn she was
+constantly knitting now, in the intervals of the white seam which was
+kept in the background. The gentleman’s socks might be for ‘the
+Lieutenant,’ though soon after entering his regiment he had, somewhat to
+his aunties’ mortification, declined politely further services from
+their knitting-needles, or the woollen articles might be muffatees and
+_what-nots_ for the Dorcas table at a bazaar; but plain needle-work was
+more difficult to explain away. Shirtmaking had gone out of fashion as a
+becoming attention from ladies to their male relations, and it might
+well be thought that the Miss Mackinnons had each an ample stock to last
+her all her days of under-linen of her mother’s bleaching and her
+grandmother’s spinning.
+
+Eneas would add to the gloves a brace of partridges of his own shooting,
+or a basket of grapes from the Semple Barns vineries, or from other and
+less aristocratic mansions--the contents of which were at his disposal
+if he chose. The grapes went the same way as the gloves, the luxuries
+were exchanged for necessities. But the partridges, if they were not
+adroitly confiscated to the use of the donor, made a feast-day in the
+old house in St. Mungo’s Square. They constituted what the ladies called
+‘a flesh denner,’ a gross meal in which the eaters had ceased to indulge
+every day.
+
+The whole establishment always put on its best face. The blanks and
+deficiencies were hidden by a series of elaborate manœuvres which
+sometimes took an hour or two to carry out. The Miss Mackinnons wore
+their company gowns and caps on the days when they expected their
+grand-nephew. It was a temporary return, however halting, to the glories
+of the past, and though the effort cost trouble, it refreshed the jaded
+spirits and put new life into the drudging, sordid existence of the
+hard-tried women.
+
+‘I wonder if he’ll notice that anything more is missing,’ suggested Miss
+Janet mysteriously. ‘There’s the clock and the ile picture of the
+Pretender, whom our great-grandfather waited on at Shawfield House,
+though he had no thocht of going out with the Prince. Both the clock and
+the picture are gone since Eneas was here. The last time, you mind, we
+took him up to Auntie Meye’s bedroom, where less has been lifted. But
+men are not noticing, and if the Lieutenant minds the twa things, he may
+think the one is at the watchmaker’s and the other at the
+picture-cleaner’s, and put no questions. But mind, Betheye, you maun be
+ready with your answer that he maun have forgotten we have a spring
+cleaning, when we pu’ things about. It’s just a divert to
+out-of-the-world auld leddies like us. It’s true in the main, and for a
+white lee or twa--they cannot be helped--I trust we may be forgi’en in a
+gude cause. Better tell them than break a fine lad’s spirit. The
+Mackinnons--the men of them--had high spirits, that would not have
+brooked what we could tell.’
+
+‘How could they have helped brooking it, Janet?’ asked Miss Bethia a
+little stolidly; and then, without waiting to learn the result of an
+idle inquiry to which Miss Janet vouchsafed no reply, Miss Bethia
+continued--‘What I’m maist feared for is Meye coming out with some piece
+of information she should keep to herself. I have signalled to her to
+ca’ canny [be prudent], in case o’ mistakes, till she’s grown dorty
+[cross] about it, and she wonders if I want her, the auldest, to be dumb
+as well as deaf.’
+
+‘Puir Meye!’ said Miss Janet in accents of loud commiseration, which,
+however, did not penetrate the sealed ears of what looked like the image
+of a woman huddled up in shawls, with eyes that, in place of showing the
+dimness of age, had a bird-like brightness about them as they darted
+swiftly, trying to do the work of two senses, from the one to the other
+of the speakers.
+
+‘Preserve us a’, she’s reproaching us at this minute,’ said Miss Janet,
+as she rose with some signs of rheumatic stiffness, went to the slate
+hung on the wall behind her sister’s chair, took it down, and wrote on
+it in large letters, as if Miss Mackinnon were blind as well as deaf,
+‘We’re feared for you letting out anything before the Lieutenant.’
+
+‘Do you tak’ me for an eedit?’ Miss Mackinnon retorted with asperity,
+while Miss Janet was heedfully erasing in the most primitive manner what
+she had written.
+
+‘Since the Beelyie has lent us back the punch-bowl to lie for the day in
+its auld place below the sideboard,’ reflected Miss Janet with some
+complacency, ‘and Kate Carstairs has sent ower her cut crystal claret
+joog, which is the marrow o’ what ours used to be, the room may pass.’
+
+‘If he’ll not draw up the blinds,’ said Miss Bethia anxiously; ‘men
+have aye such a wark with licht. I’ll be sitting on eggs lest he should
+find out that half of the chairs now are bedroom chairs.’
+
+‘Hoots! he’ll be at the fit of the table, and he never moves aince he
+has set down. Eneas is not a jumping-jack--he gangs about his business
+with deliberation, as befits a gentleman, and no a waiter that’s aye
+bobbin’ up at your elby. I wish he had gotten something better than the
+toasted cheese that nane of us can touch even in the middle of the day,
+for our stamacks,’ ended Miss Janet, half unconsciously committing a
+pious fraud on herself and her sisters, and not caring to recall that,
+for the price of the cheese and such-like dainties, the family had been
+obliged to go without a scraping of butter on their bread for more than
+one breakfast and tea--their principal meals lately. ‘But it is only his
+lunch before his mess denner, and there’s jeely and bread--he had a
+great troke [trade] with jeely and bread when he was a laddie--and the
+claret in the claret-joog to set aff the table.’
+
+There was a pause, during which a kind of scared look came into Miss
+Bethia’s pallid and haggard, no longer simpering face.
+
+‘If everything gangs bit by bit, Janet,’ she said with a little catch in
+her breath, ‘and we eat them a’ up, there will sune be--not to say not a
+table to set a meal upon, there will not be a meal left--the very
+parritch and trecle will fail. How will we keep it from the Lieutenant,
+and what will we do then?’
+
+‘Wheesht! things will never come to that pass,’ said Miss Janet with
+whitening lips, but still speaking resolutely. ‘You never ken what may
+happen--a silly [delicate] man cannot last for ever.’
+
+‘Oh, Janet, if you mean Archie Fenton of Strathdivie,’ cried Miss
+Bethia, to whom a nod was not as good as a wink, and every innuendo
+must be made a plain statement, ‘it’s ill countin’ on dead men’s shoon,
+and he’s younger than either you or Meye.’
+
+‘I ken that without your telling me,’ Miss Janet said snappishly. ‘But
+none of us, auld or young, can live for ever. Surely he may dee as well
+as another. Forbye, we’ve been telled the insurance offices refused a
+policy on his life when his sister was still to the fore ten years
+syne.’
+
+‘But, oh, it’s fearsome to speak of it!’ murmured Miss Bethia, as if the
+next act in the drama would be a plotted murder.
+
+‘I’m sure I’m not wanting to think or speak about it,’ protested Miss
+Janet.
+
+‘And I’m not sure but we’ve gane the wrong way,’ said Miss Bethia,
+hanging her head, not so much with conscious guilt as at finding fault
+with her elder sisters. ‘If, before we had let the furniture gang, we
+had tried a gentleman lodger or twa--- ’
+
+‘Betheye Mackinnon, do you ken what you’re sayin’?’ demanded Miss
+Janet, in a voice the sternness of which was awful in the culprit’s
+ears. ‘Is this like a common lodging-house? I mind the day when for the
+word “lodgers” to have been breathed in St. Mungo’s Square would have
+been for all Glasgy to be up in arms. Are we like lodging-house keepers?
+Does the trade fit the auld Virginian Mackinnons? And what of the
+Lieutenant’s honour, I should like to ken?’
+
+‘Well, I’m sure, Janet, I meant no harm,’ said Miss Betheye, almost
+reduced to tears; ‘and folk were not so nice lang syne. I aye mind how
+our mother used to speak of Leddy Mary and Leddy Betty Bogle, who thocht
+no shame to be dress-makers, though their father claimed an earldom.’
+
+‘The earldom claimed or allowed made all the difference in the world,’
+said Miss Janet oracularly. ‘Not that the Mackinnons have not their
+richts as well as the Bogles. Forbye, the mantua-making and millinery
+was held a genteel trade. But a lodgin’-house with maiden leddies
+waitin’ on strange men! I wonder at you, Betheye!’
+
+The last stroke overwhelmed Miss Bethia.
+
+‘Eh! I didna think,’ she cried so falteringly that her judge was
+mollified.
+
+‘Weel, you maun mind another time and not be so heedless with your
+words. You’re not a bairn now, Betheye. But say no more about it. Let me
+hear about the order that Walkingshaw’s has given you for hand-made
+nicht-gowns. I micht manage the hemming of the tails [skirts] and the
+running up of the seams, though even with my glasses I cannot attempt
+the stitching.’
+
+‘I could manage it all fine mysel’, and let you lie down in the
+afternoons; you’re that troubled with the fires, and the flures, and the
+beds, and only auld Tibbie to wash out the door-steps and carry awa’
+the aiss. Then Meye’s winter hoast [cough] is not awa’, so that ye
+cannot get rested in the nicht. Oh, I could manage fine! But they say
+there’s little demand for hand-sewing, so muckle is done now with the
+machine. The feck o’ folk are pleased even though the ends are not
+fastened and the sewing does not last. They have ta’en fourpence aff the
+price, and they find faut with the heathering,’ ended Miss Bethia, in a
+deplorable voice. ‘The very thing that I prided myself on--me that was
+sic a gude worker of sprigged and heathered collars--do you mind?’
+
+‘Set them up!’ cried Miss Janet indignantly. ‘They suld be proud to have
+a leddy sew for them, that was the best fancy-worker, as well as the
+best piany-player, in Glasgy. But they ken nae better. What suld some
+auld mill lass, ganging trailing now in silks and satins, understand of
+heathering and sprigging? It is a disgrace to the auld shop-folk that
+they humour sic low gentry. I wonder what Walkinshaw’s would say if I
+sent Eneas to them, ganging tramping into the shop, and maybe drawing
+his swurd, if he were in his regimentals, because of the insult to his
+auntie?’
+
+‘Na, na, Eneas maun never hear a cheep [whisper] about it; you would be
+the last to tell him. It would be a fell-like thing for him if it were
+ever jaloused that ane of his aunties--auld Eneas Mackinnon’s
+great-grand-dochters--wrocht for a shop. Sirs! my heart came into my
+mouth the last time he was here, and spoke of the Macmasters’ ball, and
+me kennin’ all the time, and having only the word of Walkinshaw’s it
+would be kept secret, that I had just sent to the shop a set of
+slip-bodies--cammysoles, they ca’ them now--for the Miss Macmasters!’
+
+‘_Miss_ Macmasters! quo she,’ echoed Miss Janet, in the highest key;
+‘_Lass_ Macmasters would be liker the thing. Why, her faither was the
+lamp-lichter in the Square, and his faither a ferryman up the water. I
+thocht, when he spoke, offishers mak’ theirselves cheap noo-a-days, and
+the Macmasters’ was not a house for Eneas Mackinnon to set his foot
+intil.’
+
+‘For a’ that, he said it was the brawest house on that side of the Park,
+and the Miss Macmasters were not ill-lookin’, and did their
+dancing-maister credit, if they could but get rid of the Glasgy tongue.
+I wonder what there is in the Glasgy ony mair than in the Edinburgh or
+the Perth speech. But they’re no leddies, or it wouldna signify how they
+spoke.’
+
+‘Leddies! Rab Macmaster’s dochters leddies! Are you daft, Betheye? But
+it is aboot Eneas’s hour. Meye’s watch--the last we have left--is not to
+be depended on, and we havena the knock [clock] to correct it by. I wish
+we were nearer a toon knock. There are the factory bells in the
+morning, and at the denner hour, and the sun on the wa’; but when one
+has not been bred to lippen [trust] to them, they’re apt to be
+deceitful. I maun see to the cheese. Yes, you’ll do,’ as Miss Bethia
+brushed down her shabby, turned silk gown. ‘You’re looking uncommonly
+weel, Betheye, and I’ve just to draw on my gloves before I go to the
+front door.’
+
+‘The Lieutenant thinks you’re getting pridefu’, Janet, with your
+gloves.’
+
+‘What for no?’ asked Miss Janet, between jocoseness and defiance. ‘I was
+entitled to my pride in my youth, and sae may I be yet. But I mauna
+forget a parting word of caution to Meye.’
+
+She crossed to the stationary, isolated sister, and began an
+incomprehensible pantomime of pointing with her finger, moving her jaws,
+shaking her head, and waving her hand. When it seemed lost on Miss
+Mackinnon, Miss Janet had again recourse to the slate and slate-pencil,
+saying regretfully, ‘Poor Meye! she’s no sae gleg [quick] as she was
+wont to be; we’re so ta’en up, she’s left ower muckle to hersel’.’ Miss
+Janet wrote--‘If you please, Meye, you’ll not touch the cheese, lest
+there should not be ower muckle for the gentleman. We’ll have some of
+the bread and jelly, which is the proper lunch for ladies. If there is
+any cheese left in the dish, it will toast up again for your tea.’
+
+Miss Mackinnon understood now, and answered in a voice hoarse and harsh
+from the absence of modulation--she did not appear propitiated. ‘I think
+I ken what is fit for leddies eating either at lunch or denner, without
+you giving me a lesson. But you and Betheye are for ever whispering and
+colleagin’ thegither, like a pair of ill-bred bairns. I wish you had
+found some other lunch for our nephew than what makes the smell of a
+moose-trap all over the house. You micht have had ham and eggs.’
+
+‘And the ham so dear, and the eggs extortion!’ broke in Miss Janet, in
+an aside to Miss Bethia.
+
+‘Or a chop; it is long since I have tasted a chop,’ Miss Mackinnon
+continued to complain.
+
+‘Puir body! you would not have been likely to taste it. The Lieutenant
+would have eaten ane, maybe twa, for his ain share, having a healthy
+young appetite, and being without a care,’ commented Miss Janet once
+more.
+
+Then Miss Mackinnon relented a little: ‘Dinna fash [trouble] to keep
+cheese for me. It is kind of you to think of it, but I would not touch
+it if you and Betheye had not your share, though it were but a curran’
+[a crumb]. ‘Deed, when I come to think of it, I believe it does disagree
+with my stamack; but you, with your housework, and Betheye with her
+walks back and forwards to Walkinshaw’s, should be able to digest
+whin-stanes.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+FAMILY TALK.
+
+
+Eneas arrived at the appointed time. He was enough of a gentleman not to
+keep people waiting, though he was also a male version of that
+unfortunate princess on whom the lines were written:
+
+    ‘There was no hurry in her hands,
+       No hurry in her feet;
+     For life had brought no joy to her
+       That she should run to meet,’
+
+As yet, life had brought little joy to Lieutenant Eneas. He was a
+stranded young fellow, who had to keep a tight hold of the most innocent
+inclination. He ate the sparse meal of enforced self-denial and petty
+economy, without any higher aim than to keep himself afloat in an
+irksome position. He saw no end to his slavery to circumstances, while
+it was rendering him hopeless and spiritless, though the youth still
+left in him asserted itself by fits and starts. He might turn his face
+to the wall and knock under any day. It is men like him who, when
+sickness comes, though they are or ought to have been in the flush and
+vigour of their days, make little fight for life.
+
+He was received with open arms, like a conquering hero. But happily he
+was not overpowered with caresses, for the Miss Mackinnons were of the
+old tough Scotch fibre that disdained fondling. He was grateful to them
+for it, and put up with other inconveniences, such as their perpetual
+satisfaction with his position and crow of exultation over his lot. It
+was not for him to undeceive them; besides their world was not his
+world, they would never appreciate his difficulties--he could hardly
+dignify them by calling them trials.
+
+He had a vague impression that the old grey house looked emptier and
+more cheerless, as well as more haunted than formerly, and that his
+aunts were liker scare-crows than they used to be. The young sisters
+dressed alike now, finding that, as they were very much of one size,
+they could manage better by borrowing and exchanging articles of dress,
+so that a presentable suit of clothes might be said to do duty for both
+ladies so long as only one appeared at a time. This was impossible in
+the present instance, but it would not strike Eneas if little bits of
+_déshabillé_ peeped out here and there. The two wore the same
+arrangement of lace--alas! it was imitation in these latter
+days--disposed about the gaunt drab heads; the same old-fashioned
+collars reaching to the shoulders, turned up cuffs, and ‘belts’ round
+their short waists. But what Miss Bethia had gained in imposing style
+she had lost in the quality of the materials.
+
+By the time Lieutenant Eneas was established at the foot of the table,
+and the aroma of a dozen mouse-traps had assailed his delicate nostrils,
+he felt a good deal exercised by the necessity of divulging a step he
+had taken. He was half ashamed of its origin, and he was afraid his
+aunts might suspect and resent the liberty. But there was no retreat.
+
+He had already presented mits, which Lady Semple had suggested as an
+appropriate gift to old ladies. The offering had met with approval, been
+received with plaudits indeed; only Miss Janet had failed to remove her
+gloves, to try her muffles, as she termed them, on her scarred and
+disfigured hands.
+
+Now he drew a carefully tied up roll of paper from the pocket of his
+shooting-jacket, and began to unfasten it with awkward shyness.
+
+‘I called in at Lang’s on my way,’ he said, ‘not for lunch, of course; I
+knew it would be awaiting me here. I wanted something which I sometimes
+have to breakfast. I don’t know if you are familiar with it, Auntie
+Janet, but I thought you might like it for a change.’
+
+‘Is’t a coocumber?’ cried Miss Janet.
+
+‘It’s mair like row-chow tobaccy,’ said Miss Bethia.
+
+‘It is a Bologna sausage,’ said Eneas, with a blush. ‘It wants no
+cooking; if you will make the servant bring a knife and fork and plate,
+I shall cut you some slices, and you will see how good it is.’
+
+‘I have not tasted it for mony a day,’ exclaimed Miss Mackinnon in her
+harsh voice, with a hungry gleam in her sharp eyes. ‘The very smell goes
+about my heart.’
+
+‘It makes my mouth water,’ chimed in Miss Bethia, forgetting herself.
+
+Miss Janet interposed quickly:
+
+‘Betheye, you fetch the plate and knife and fork. Lunch is not a meal of
+ceremony, and the lass is out of the way. She’s never to be found when
+she’s wanted,’ she went on, with a touch of the finesse of Caleb
+Balderstone. ‘There’s sic a cry out now for half-holidays and evenings
+to the lasses’ sel’s, that maisters and mistresses are ill served.’
+
+Miss Bethia returned with the necessary implements, and with her mind
+set at rest by the reinforcement to the eatables. She could enjoy the
+contribution with a clear conscience and a large appetite.
+
+‘It’s most deleeci-ous,’ she prolonged the word while she spoke with her
+mouth full, and looked with eager invitation at her sisters. ‘Tak’
+another slice, Meye. Help yourself, Janet. It was most kind and mindful
+of you, Eneas, to think of bringing the sausage.’
+
+‘Good heavens!’ thought the Lieutenant, taken aback by the
+_empressement_ with which his attention to his own comfort had been
+received, ‘can the poor creatures have become so miserly that they are
+in danger of starving themselves to make a hoard?’ But he was not quick
+to take up an idea, and this one--partly fallacious--dropped out of his
+mind, as he submitted to a process of proud and affectionate ‘heckling’
+or cross-questioning as to the prosperous and brilliant course of life
+he was supposed to lead.
+
+‘And what fine doings have you had of late, Lieutenant?’ began Miss
+Janet. ‘Here’s the slate and the slate-pencil,’ disengaging them from
+the wall and putting them into his reluctant hands. ‘Write your news
+down for Meye, while you tell them to me and your Aunt Betheye.’
+
+‘But unfortunately there is very little to tell,’ said Eneas,
+endeavouring to rouse himself to call to mind and retail a little
+information that would be agreeable to his hearers. ‘I was at Semple
+Barns for three days last week. There were private theatricals at the
+Hepburns’ on Tuesday, and a dinner and dance later in the evening at the
+Gilhaizes’ on Thursday.’
+
+‘You’re coming on. If three ploys in a week are not enough to serve you,
+you’re ill to serve,’ said Miss Bethia gaily.
+
+‘But they were not great ploys,’ Eneas felt driven to defend himself.
+‘The acting at the Hepburns’ was wretched, and the dinner at the
+Gilhaizes’ the most stupid affair I have taken part in for an age.
+Semple Barns was well enough. Lady Semple is good-natured, and Sir James
+not past tolerating; besides, young Semple’s my greatest chum in the
+regiment. No, no claret, thanks, Aunt Bethia; I never indulge in it to
+luncheon; I prefer a glass of ale. Don’t mind it to-day; I see you do
+not have it at hand--another time,’ he murmured. ‘Shall I pour you out
+some claret? No? Have you joined the Blue Ribbon Army? for I don’t
+suppose that you swill beer like a drayman or a sub.’
+
+‘My dear, that’s a fell-like comparison, as well as a low-lifed
+expression.’
+
+Miss Janet did not hesitate to rebuke her favourite, but she spoke less
+sharply than usual.
+
+‘No; we’re no Gude Templars,’ remarked Miss Bethia, ‘but we find we’re
+as well without wine--it’s heating for the blude. We jist keep the
+claret-joog as a finish to the table.’
+
+‘I hope you explain the nature of the case to your visitors,’ said Eneas
+seriously. ‘You know there is a prejudice against decanted wine which
+has stood about. Suppose some unlucky fellow who holds the prejudice
+were to help himself, not knowing the state of matters!’
+
+‘Hoots! we dinna want ony of your mess-table fikes here.’ Miss Janet
+dismissed the scruple lightly. ‘For my part, I think wine is all the
+better after it has ta’en with the decanter; though it had little
+chance to do that when it gaed like ditch-water in the hoose. The
+tappet-hen was not supposed to stand still, ony mair than the shelty,’
+referring to the merry titles for the old jugs which travelled
+unceasingly round hospitable Scotch tables, with wine, spirits, or
+punch.
+
+‘Wha were a’ at Semple Barns?’ asked Miss Mackinnon, who had been
+conning her slate.
+
+‘Only the family, with the addition of Miss Drysdale of Drysdale Hall.’
+
+‘And what’s she like?’
+
+‘Upon my word, auntie, that is a posing question,’ he answered with a
+laugh. ‘It is not always easy to describe a young lady; and when one has
+to write the description on a slate, which all who run may read, the
+task is still more ticklish. But here goes,’ and he wrote in one of the
+scrawling hands of the nineteenth century, which he was sufficiently
+good-natured to struggle to render legible:
+
+‘Miss Drysdale is a very handsome girl, with quite good manners, only a
+little brusque or haughty--I am not sure which. They say she will have a
+large fortune.’
+
+Miss Janet and Miss Bethia, even Miss Mackinnon, screwed up their faces
+and looked at each other. One fortune had come already from Drysdale
+Haugh to the Mackinnons. Why not a second? True, the first had not
+brought great luck, but that might be because it was not big enough, or
+because poor Maggie Craig had not all the advantages ascribed to Miss
+Drysdale.
+
+For a wonder, the Lieutenant chanced to notice and interpret the
+exchange of glances, and made an effort to put his foot on the folly at
+once. He was so annoyed at the necessity that he grew red while he said,
+with assumed carelessness: ‘She is a great deal at Semple Barns. The
+Semples may have an eye on her for Semple, but I don’t think it will
+ever come to a match. He’s not a bad fellow, but it is a poor
+baronetcy; and what with her looks and her tin, I should say she would
+look higher.’
+
+‘Set her up!’ Miss Janet employed her favourite adjuration. ‘Tam
+Drysdale’s dochter, and her mother are o’ the Mercers that had a pauchel
+[small farm] and a meal-mill some gate near Partick. But it makes me
+sick, laddie, to hear tell of Drysdale Haugh and Drysdale Ha’, as I’ve
+been telt Tam Drysdale has nick-named the auld farmhoose. I kenned the
+place well enough before you were born; and it seems aye as if it should
+all be yours in richt of your mither, whatever power she gave your
+father to dispose of her property.’
+
+‘I wish it were,’ he said, smothering a yawn; ‘but, as you are aware, if
+wishes were horses beggars would ride; and since the place was sold
+before I was born, I am afraid I have not the shadow of a title to
+complain.’
+
+‘It is very queer and hard though to us, who can look back and mind
+your father and mother’s marriage in this very hoose,’ said Miss Bethia,
+echoing her sister’s sentiments, ‘after all the speak that was made
+about her land and the works that Tam Drysdale’s coining money out of.’
+
+‘And every care was taken,’ said Miss Janet, condescending to offer
+solemn assurance of her share in the precautions. ‘I mind, as if it were
+yesterday, giving Kate Carstairs her congy in the drawing-room, in order
+to see to the signing of the contract in this room’--looking round, as
+if the few sticks of furniture which were left would find a voice, and
+testify to the watchfulness employed in vain.
+
+There was no rapping diablerie heard from the old mahogany, neither did
+any subtle instinct tell Miss Janet that, in the language of children
+when they approach a hidden secret, she was ‘as hot as fire’ at that
+moment.
+
+‘Did your father never speak of his marriage contract?’ she inquired in
+perfect unconsciousness, getting, if possible, hotter still.
+
+‘No,’ answered Eneas, a little impatiently; ‘how should he? You forget
+he died when I was little more than an infant.’
+
+‘I wonder what became o’t,’ reflected Miss Janet. ‘Dauvit Milne wound up
+the auld Milnes’ business, so that there was little gudewill o’t to
+sell; and the lad Dalgleish gaed aff to the ends of the earth after that
+silly thing, Tina Carstairs, had drawn up with him. It’s all very well
+for her Auntie Kate to call him a judge, and say they’re riding in their
+carriage out yonder. There’s naebody to contradict her. But I’m
+thinking, Eneas, your father got the contract into his ain hands.’
+
+‘I dare say he did,’ said Eneas indifferently. ‘The man of business
+would see it was all right; and if it had been of the least consequence,
+we should have heard more of it.’
+
+‘I’ll hae a look among the family papers,’ said Miss Janet. She had
+hardly a moral doubt after all, that, though she might have forgotten
+the circumstance, the document must have been committed to her keeping.
+
+‘Do you know, auntie, I never was at Drysdale Haugh.’ The Lieutenant
+made a little change in the subject. ‘I have only seen it--the house, I
+mean, which looks a jolly place from a distance.’
+
+‘To think it was your mother’s property!’ exclaimed Miss Bethia, with
+another groan, letting the hands, with the knitting she had already
+taken up, drop in her lap.
+
+‘But it is only fair to remember,’ said Eneas, with that exasperating
+manly element of justice which so often acts like a cold douche on
+women’s emotions, ‘that, as I have heard you say, my mother, or rather
+my grandmother, was no blood relation to the old owner of the farm; it
+was by favour he left it to her, and she must have been considered an
+interloper by the man’s relations. It will only seem to them righteous
+retribution that lands and works are lost to her descendants, and
+restored to his.’
+
+‘Nonsense, Eneas!’ said Miss Janet tartly. ‘Auld Drysdale brocht your
+grandmother up, and came bound to leave her his gear; forbye, he had no
+near relation. This Tam Drysdale is only the son of a cousin, a
+ragamuffin that the auld man would never have seen in his road.’
+
+‘Well, it is clear that I should never have made a dyer and
+calico-printer like this Drysdale,’ persisted Eneas. ‘Sir James Semple
+says he is a remarkable man, and has not his superior among the Glasgow
+magistrates. The son is good form, and a bit of a scholar, and, strange
+to say, of a Radical. I have told you what the eldest daughter is like.
+Will you be horrified to hear me say that I am going with Dick Semple
+to call on the Drysdales one of these days? I have a little curiosity to
+see what might have been mine.’
+
+‘The curiosity is very natural,’ said Miss Janet, speaking most
+tolerantly, ‘but I’m not sure whether proper pride might not have
+slipped in and forbidden you to set a foot within that door, if you had
+not been an offisher, upsides with the best in the land, fit to ca’ the
+king your brither. Horrified! No, Lieutenant, by no manner of means,’
+declared Miss Janet, smoothing down her ruffled plumes, and yielding to
+mercenary motives. ‘Gang the very first opportunity--you have our full
+consent--and bring us word of all the new-fangled doings.’
+
+‘We do not ken a single body that can tell us,’ put in Miss Bethia,
+‘except Athole Murray, Dr. Peter’s dochter, and she beats about the buss
+as gin we would be hurt by the purse-proud grandeur,’ forgetting that
+she had no objection to avail herself once more of the source of that
+grandeur on her kinsman’s behoof.
+
+Eneas was smiling his languid smile behind his reddish-brown beard. He
+had not meant to ask his aunts’ consent to pay a morning call. Neither
+had he the smallest intention of becoming a reporter of the magnificence
+of the fortunate dyer and calico-printer, thus nourishing idiotic
+fancies, or calling forth fresh jeremiads on his loss of what had never
+been his, and perhaps ought not to have been his mother’s.
+
+Still the young man did his best to render himself agreeable to the
+women who had brought him up, each of whom held him as the apple of her
+eye. He was too well intentioned not to feel a certain remorse because
+he was not able to do more for them--were it only to entertain a warmer
+feeling where they were concerned. He meant to please Miss Bethia when
+he told her that he had been speaking to Lady Semple, who was fond of
+Scotch music, of the reels that seemed to be his aunt’s private
+property. He wished her to play one, of which he whistled a bar, to see
+if he were right in the idea he had given Lady Semple of the tune.
+
+But Miss Bethia did not offer to move, and looked put out, until Miss
+Janet came to her aid, and informed him that the piano was in need of
+tuning.
+
+‘Why, it was out of tune the last time I was here--you should not let it
+stand in that state, or has it got too bad to be put in order?’
+
+‘That’s just it,’ said Miss Bethia, with a peculiar tone in her voice.
+‘That’s the way o’t. The instrument is growing auld--like its mistress.
+It is the worse of the wear, and so is my music. I’m feared I’ve had no
+time for practising of late, and the noise fashes Meye--no that she
+hears it--that’s just the vexation,’ she hastened to add, to hide the
+stumble she had made; ‘she cannot bide to see my hands moving, and no a
+sound to catch her ear. Na, Lieutenant, you maun tak’ to new pianies and
+new players.’
+
+He had never heard Miss Bethia hint at growing old before, or fail to
+receive any compliment to her playing as if it were not less than its
+due. Her manner gave him a small shock. ‘I wonder what it all means?’ he
+puzzled himself to make out, as he descended the stair and passed out
+into the square.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE PEOPLE’S HOLIDAY.
+
+
+Since a charter was granted by William the Lyon to enable the
+inhabitants of Glasgow to hold an annual fair within its bounds, Glasgow
+Fair has been the great gala of the year to the hordes of craftsmen,
+factory hands, small traders, wharf and quay men, hewers of wood and
+drawers of water of every description, with their entire families--from
+the baby in arms to the big unruly hobbledehoy. Riotous merrymaking is
+the realization, to a multitude of toilers, of temporary relief from
+work, and meetings with present cronies and old friends.
+
+Two or three days’ unshackled pursuit of pleasure--more or less
+hilarious--derives a further spice of excitement from the fact that the
+fun, as it becomes fast and furious, is in imminent danger of
+degenerating into folly or worse, that many an aching head and sore
+heart, some broken bones, incarceration in a city gaol, and an
+opportunity of returning to the world a sadder and a wiser man, are not
+infrequent results of the saturnalia.
+
+It matters little to the mass of the revellers that the conditions of
+the city fair have undergone a great change since its institution; that
+the staple articles of trade in which the fair originated--the ‘horn,
+corn, wool, and yarn,’ long the standing toast at every feast in the
+district--have merged into a great horse and cattle market, in which
+servants are still ‘arled,’ with the site removed to a different quarter
+of the city. The Green is given up for the occasion to shooting and
+drinking booths, sweetie-stands, gorgeously painted shows and caravans,
+swings and merry-go-rounds, to the proprietors of which enjoyment is
+combined with profit. Strangers, country people from the Highlands and
+the Lowlands, roam about, still more entranced than the natives. The
+children are in Paradise. Bagpipes squeal, fiddles scrape, drums beat
+‘Barum, barum, baree.’ The hum of the sing-song speech, the gleeful roar
+when a crowd laughs, the shouting of the more than half-fou
+merry-makers, rise above the music, and are borne many a mile away,
+refined by distance, till they echo with almost a plaintive sound among
+the rigging of outward-bound ships ‘down Clyde.’
+
+Perhaps the two chief marks of altered fashions which separate the
+modern from the ancient Glasgow Fairs are to be found in the following
+signs of the times. There is an almost entire withdrawal of the upper
+classes from taking any share in the gala, except when evening has
+fallen and thrown a veil over the scene. Then, under the slight
+obscurity of a summer night, some of the young choice or unchoice
+spirits among the Glasgow princes condescend to form parties, and stroll
+in bands over the ground for the gratification of elbowing their way
+among their inferiors, cracking jokes right and left, interviewing the
+giants and the fat girls, or imagining themselves the heroes of not very
+heroic adventures. Not a conventional gentleman, not a single woman who
+makes any pretension to being a lady, appears where their grandfathers
+and grandmothers mixed freely with the multitude, relished the whole
+spectacle heartily, and claimed their due in the people’s holiday.
+
+Another conspicuous innovation is that, though the numbers of the
+sight-seers and pleasure-seekers are kept up on the Green, they are
+always drawn from lower sources, and an Irish flavour like that of
+Donnybrook is increasing among the elements of the composition.
+Expeditions and excursions have become the order of the day with the
+better-class working-people as well as with their employers. The
+wandering spirit that possesses the men and women of the nineteenth
+century has reached the Glasgow mechanics. They judge wisely enough that
+if the weather is favourable, at the height of the season, two things
+are preferable even to the delights of the Green.
+
+The one is a cheap sail, lasting for several hours, which will carry the
+passengers in the steamboats far beyond the hazy smoke-tainted
+atmosphere, where the air blows caller off the salt water, up among the
+numerous lochs, shadowed by the mountains, that fringe the Western
+coast. The other is a run by railway to the Campsie or the Farnese
+Hills, or down into Robbie Burns’s country--green Ayrshire--with wild
+roses to be pulled from the hedges and horse-gowans by the wayside, and
+the first hare-bells are to be seen nodding on Castle Downans where
+fairies dance, and the earliest poppies bursting open in the fields by
+Kirk Allowa’. The women and children agree with the husbands, fathers,
+and sweethearts. So the summer navy of steamboats starting from the
+Broomielaw is doubled and quadrupled. At the railway stations stout
+guards, bareheaded, without their coats, struggle manfully, no longer
+red but white in the face, to hold back the invading host, check their
+tickets, and send them without accident to their destination.
+
+‘Whaur are ye for?’ cries the herculean protector of the public,
+clutching by the breast an old man far upwards of seventy, as he
+stumbles on alone to the platform. ‘For the tr-rain,’ answers the piping
+voice, while the lacklustre eyes gaze wildly in the face of the sturdy,
+kind inquisitor, as their owner makes the self-evident declaration.
+
+The giant thus delayed in his office, with the thronging thousands
+pressing upon him, shows marvellous patience.
+
+‘Whatna train, Gruffer?’ he cross-questions the innocent offender, while
+the speaker seizes the chance to pass his black hand over his steaming
+brows.
+
+‘Jist the tr-rain for my gude-dochter’s [daughter-in-law’s],’ reiterates
+the aged traveller a little peevishly at being thus interrupted and kept
+in the van of the swaying force that have borne him forward on their
+advancing wave.
+
+‘Weel, ye maun stand aside by me till ye mind whaur your gude-dochter
+lives. Whaur are you for, mem? Hae you a ticket, laddie?’ and so on,
+with the ceaseless interrogations to the troops marching without orders,
+and not knowing whither they are to turn--north, south, east, or west.
+
+In one of the steamers that paddled swiftly down the broad stream, with
+its decks so covered with passengers that they seemed to occupy every
+seat that could furnish a resting-place, and to gather in clusters and
+knots like so many bees, one man looked all alone, and as if he rather
+drew back out of sight, standing with his hands in his pockets in the
+shadow of the funnel. His attitude and air were unlike the jovial
+bearing of the rest of the voyagers, which might well be, since the
+intruder in the ranks was young Tam Drysdale, with a sneaking
+inclination to see for himself what the people’s holiday was like. There
+was indignant bitterness in his heart that they were left to take it all
+alone, and a regretful remembrance of holidays he had seen abroad--for
+young Glasgow with a full purse is generally tolerably familiar with the
+continent and America, though Asia and Africa may hardly yet have
+entered into his calculations. Tam could recall many a village and even
+great town, beyond the German Ocean, where princes--not merchant
+princes merely, but men of royal blood, fit to mate with kings and
+queens, with their princesses, noblemen and noblewomen not a few--had
+not scorned to grace the proceedings, as if they were still those of the
+Middle Ages. The whole company had joined fearlessly in the games, as if
+the princes belonged to the people and the people to the princes, and
+had yet one heart between them to be gay or sorry in unison. In this
+light it did not seem to matter so much as people supposed that these
+foreign peasants were further back in the knowledge of many things, had
+a smaller number of comforts, were forced to be more frugal in their
+ways, while they had infinitely fewer chances of rising in the world.
+
+At the same time, young Tam lingered on the least popular side of the
+funnel, and could not tell for his life how he was to fraternize with
+any of the groups around him. His father could have done it far sooner.
+Auld Tam still held the ‘open sesame,’ though he did not choose to use
+it. He understood these men and women, by old fellow-feeling and genuine
+sympathy, a world better than the son with his dreams fathomed their
+wants and wishes. Even young Tam’s mother and his sister Eppie could
+have made friends much more readily than he could. Those two would have
+done it in right of their abounding, sweet, guileless womanhood, in
+which he had no part.
+
+Still, the incapacity he felt galled the young man as with the sense of
+an injustice done to him, an artificial barrier foisted upon him, and
+erected between him and those whom he sought to call his friends. He
+could not tell exactly what separated him from the humanity around him.
+It was not lack of goodwill on his part. It was not dress--that
+frequently potent agent in rearing or levelling dead walls between a
+man and his neighbour. Tam had thought of that beforehand. He had made
+an elaborate study of the fact that the better-paid, better-conducted
+operatives and small shopkeepers--the very people who took their wives
+and children for excursions on the Fair-days--resigned their moleskins
+for the occasion, and disported themselves in more or less ill-fitting
+broadcloth, with a lavish display of white shirt, silver chains across
+their vests, and tall hats. Tam had accommodated himself to the
+prevailing standard. He had exchanged his shooting-jacket for the only
+black frock-coat he possessed, and replaced his wideawake by a
+chimney-pot hat.
+
+But the general similarity in dress did little or nothing. He was eyed
+askance, good-looking fellow though he was, not merely by the men he
+came across, but by all the nicer, more discriminating women, in freshly
+washed and got up calicoes, or in sober woollen gowns, or in wonderful
+silks, and hats in which white feathers were the prevailing fashion, or
+bonnets lavishly crowned with flowers. The wearers of these garments
+dandled babies, strove to keep small children pinned to their sides, or
+flirted modestly or violently, according to taste, each with the ‘young
+chap’ who happened at that time to be in the ascendant in her circle of
+admirers. But all agreed in giving the cold shoulder, to begin with at
+least, to the young man who had the air of a gentleman, the wolf in
+sheep’s clothing whom father might not like, whom Alick or Angus or Jack
+would almost certainly disapprove of. Even the undisciplined children
+running all over the deck, getting into everybody’s way, and never out
+of scrapes, fought shy of Tam. Unlike his father, again, he had no
+manner for children. Was it his education, or his self-consciousness, or
+his very anxiety to bridge the social gulf between them, that kept him
+aloof from his kind?
+
+In the meantime the steamer--another _Iona_, fluttering with flags from
+stem to stern--was pushing down the river on the sunny yet showery
+summer day, preceded and followed by many similar vessels, through the
+labyrinth of shipping from every part of the world--past wharfs and
+warehouses deserted by toilers--past the yards, well known to the
+shipbuilders, with skeleton ships on the stocks, where the sheds were
+forsaken and the din mute. Down and down the living freight went, till
+green pastures and ripening cornfields began to smile under the very
+frown of the hills rising in the distance.
+
+Here was the heart-shaped rock of Dumbarton, with the castle where
+Wallace had lain a prisoner. There were the crowded roofs of Greenock,
+clustered under its own storm-cloud, hanging over the city churchyard,
+where Highland Mary was laid to rest. Yonder ran the Tail of the Bank,
+by which fleets have ridden at anchor, where Colin’s solitary ship was
+seen through the morning mists by the sharp eyes of the loving gudewife,
+so fain to tell that her man was ‘come to town.’ This was the entrance
+to the loch by whose shore the race of Macallum More slept soundly.
+Across the river the warning white finger of the Cloch Lighthouse bade
+belated crafts beware. Roseneath was fair as when Jeannie Deans landed
+under the guardianship of the Duke’s man. At Toward Point the tenderest
+of Highland tragedies lingered with the memory of the old clan Lamont.
+At last the twin islands of Bute and Arran came full in sight, and
+Goatfell rose, brown and grey and russet--not purple as yet--unrivalled
+from the sea, and held up a rugged face to the fleecy clouds.
+
+The steamer was bound for Rothesay Bay to discharge its load of
+humanity, in time to rush back again and bring down a fresh cargo before
+night fell. The company had enjoyed in their own way their dearly-loved
+‘water,’ with which, from youth to age, as a rule, their holiday moments
+were associated. As children they had dabbled in the shallows, as boys
+and girls they had rowed and fished for ‘podlies’ and ‘golden haddocks;’
+at all ages the passengers had sailed, first with their fathers and
+mothers, next with their mates and sweethearts, and at last with their
+children, in turn.
+
+But the voyagers bestowed only a general attention on the objects of the
+shore. The eyes which looked were well acquainted with each landmark,
+and, as a rule, they were not such eyes as to take in every tint and
+tone, every glint of light and bar of shadow, by which Nature, in her
+sameness, is ever new and ever fresh. The gazers liked to hail each
+peculiar feature. Yes, this was Helensburgh; and that was Gourock; and
+yonder was Dunoon with its Convalescent Home, from which some of them
+had profited; and farther down was Innellan, and the steamer was passing
+the mouth of Loch Striven. But everything was greeted in an easy,
+off-hand manner, that did not disturb the ‘turns’ up and down, where
+there was room to turn; the cracks and smokes of cronies, leaning over
+the side of the vessel, and idly watching its track in the water; the
+resounding jokes, that seemed to take in hundreds of grinning
+participants in the effects of the jokers’ wit. The superannuated
+fiddler near the gangway never wanted large audiences, who turned their
+shoulders on the scenery, and gave themselves up to the inexhaustible
+fascination of ‘Jessie the Flower o’ Dumblane’ and ‘The Carse o’
+Gowrie.’ It was too early to make the musician’s powers available for
+regular dancing, even if there had been space for the exercise, so that
+there were only fitful attempts at solitary exhibitions of the ‘Highland
+Fling,’ or such individual capers as could be performed on the minimum
+of boards.
+
+Additional refreshments and stimulants to those of the air and the water
+soon began to be in request. Not only were baskets and bags opened
+before the time, and bottles of various dimensions extracted and handed
+round, while unpropitious women were hospitably pressed ‘to taste,’ and
+children’s mouths stuffed with cookies and gingerbread, but visits were
+paid with ever-increasing regularity to the lower regions of the vessel,
+and returns accomplished each time after longer tarrying and with
+greater reluctance. The faces of the visitors waxed always a finer,
+deeper crimson, or a more sodden yellow or white. Eyes became fishier
+and more inclined to roll. Wagging tongues moved with more difficulty in
+the mouths which could not hold them. The enemy that is equally alluring
+to impressionable and to stoical natures, which lends zest to the
+moments, and ends by stealing away the brains, was on board and at
+work, though it was not yet noon, answering to the third hour of the day
+in Eastern countries. These clean, well-to-do workpeople, who had not
+spirit enough to enjoy themselves without having recourse to other
+spirits, which leapt at a bound from servants to masters, would soon be
+neither agreeable nor altogether safe company.
+
+Tam looked around discontentedly, and felt that he had no right to
+interfere, any more than with gentlemen in their cups, though some of
+his father’s dyers hung their heads a little, or glared defiance at him,
+as at a spy, when he nodded a greeting to them in their slinking past
+him to descend the cabin stairs. The very women looked less respectable
+than at starting. Many were flushed with anxiety or tortured with
+apprehension, or they had grown hardened and callous. The last began to
+gossip loudly and indifferently, to complain, to scold, to importune.
+They resorted to washing their dirty linen in public, to counting over
+audibly the cares and crosses in their drudging, slaving lots. Some of
+them took to asking whether, if there were oblivion and exhilaration
+going, they should not have their share as well as the men, who were
+their own masters and the stronger vessels; one or two women descended
+into the shadier recesses of the steamer, and came back smacking their
+lips, laughing uproariously, snatching up their babies, cuffing their
+elder children, bandying coarse taunts and coarser jests with whoever
+were like-minded, causing young Tam to turn away in dread of attracting
+their attention, sick with disgust and shame. The bloom of the holidays
+was brushed off ere they had well begun to a section of the
+holiday-makers.
+
+Tam had to tell himself over and over again that it was the scum of all
+mixtures which rose to the top; the mass of the pleasure-party were
+sober as yet, and he hoped that a considerable portion of them would
+continue sober to the end. But not one of them wanted him, or owned any
+sympathy with him. He was as solitary as among the rich and luxuriously
+living traders, to whose ranks his father had risen, whom the son had
+been tempted to despise. If anybody spoke to him or showed signs of
+accepting his overtures to conversation, it was sure to be a forward,
+senseless, objectionable person, whom he had to cut short. The more
+reasonable and superior a man or woman was, the more he or she seemed to
+be endowed with a proud shyness, a modest reserve, a jealous _esprit de
+corps_ as to the interference of a stranger in joys and sorrows with
+which he could have nothing to do.
+
+The interloper heard fragments of talk of long and short hours, high and
+low wages, volunteer corps and volunteer balls, night-classes,
+Sunday-schools, friendly societies, half-holidays when the brambles
+were ripe, feats of curling and skating in the dead of winter. But
+nobody that he cared to listen to desired to listen to him or to
+exchange experiences with him. He would have liked to tell some dyers
+who were grouped together speaking of their craft--his father’s trade,
+for anything that he knew yet his own in the future--all that Dr. Peter
+had recounted to him of what he had heard when he was young of Papillon,
+‘the butterfly Frenchman,’ who had brought the art of dyeing everything
+save tartan to the banks of the Clyde, and of Mackintosh, the stout
+Scot, who, among other services to his native town, after he had started
+the trade in ‘cudbear,’ had the wit to see how much further ‘Turkey-red’
+went, and worked under the direction of the stranger till he made the
+production of Turkey-red one of the arts of Glasgow, as purple was of
+Tyre.
+
+But though young Tam had come primed with such curious tales, he could
+not intrude these where there was no sign that either they or their
+teller would be welcome. His tongue was tied.
+
+In the outer cold in which he stood, young Tam’s heart warmed when he
+came suddenly on a broad, smiling, familiar face, the owner of which
+saluted him at once frankly and respectfully. He was an alien in every
+respect--in his attire, in his speech, in his occupation. He was big,
+good-natured, blustering Sandy Macnab, the head dog-man at Semple Barns,
+in kilt, plaid, sporran, and brogues, who, to please himself, was taking
+an airing and a sail with the ‘Glasgy bodies’ in the general holiday of
+the Fair. Young Tam did not affect Semple Barns so much as the rest of
+the family affected their next neighbours. Still, he was there
+occasionally, and Sandy knew him quite well as the son of Mr. Drysdale,
+Sir James’s ally. Was Tam to hobnob with Sandy, a gentleman’s
+servant--one of those hangers-on from feudal times in virtue of
+artificial needs, to whom Tam, with his radical notions, had objected
+most strongly? A comical sense of the absurdity of the situation struck
+Tam. Still, he could not resist exchanging a word with the dog-man, who
+was full of Celtic vivacity, did not dream of being anything save
+accessible, while he was too well accustomed to the society of his
+superiors in rank to take advantage of the circumstances. At present
+Sandy was perfectly sober.
+
+‘How are Sir James and Lady Semple?’ inquired Tam, as an introduction to
+the conversation.
+
+‘Sir James and my leddy are well, sir. They went south a week syne, to
+be out of the way of the Fair. For, as you know, a’ Glasgy gangs pourin’
+out of the city in every direction, and neither the road, nor the rail,
+nor the river is for the gentry at sic times. Sir Jeames is getting less
+active than he used to be in pushing his way through, and my leddy does
+not like to be tied down to bide at hame for twa or three days, so they
+have taken flicht beforehand.’
+
+Tam smiled a faint smile.
+
+‘And is this excursion in your line?’
+
+‘Weel, a sail on the water and a snuff of the hill air are aye in my
+line,’ said Sandy cordially, ‘though I confess I would rather it had
+been a “rowin’ boat,” and the hills had been nearer; but a man maun be
+thankful for sma’ mercies. However, my main errand here was to see what
+a day’s change would do for a countryman I have on my hands. He was not
+a’ there, to begin with; and, ‘deed, I think there must have been a want
+about mysel’ to tak’ sic a handful upon me, with no call save that we
+were baith acquaint with the peat-reek and the scent of the gale [bog
+myrtle]. It was a’ that fleechin’ [flattering] sorry Bawby Sed’s doing,’
+continued Sandy, in regretful deprecation of his own weakness. ‘She
+buttered me up about what I had come to, and the service I could render
+to the man. I wish I had tried the Gaelic Society first.’
+
+‘Who is he, and what is wrong with him?’ asked Tam, not deeply
+interested, but glad to be on sociable terms with one of his companions.
+
+‘Will your honour come and see?’ suggested Sandy, using one of the
+old-world phrases that still lingered in his part of the country, not
+dreaming that it could be anything save acceptable to his companion,
+who, according to his theories, ought to have preferred to be addressed
+as ‘Young Tam.’ ‘The infection is all gone, for, if you’ll believe me,
+the cratur brocht the fivver tramping south with him. He had no sooner
+been lodged with the dugs than he was laid on his back gowlin’ and
+rampagin’, clean out of his wits--of which he had never a great stock,
+in the hicht of the disease, far waur than any yappin’ and scrapin’ o’
+the bit beasts. In place of being a help to me he was an awfu’ plague.
+If I had not first fallen on my feet wi’ a gude maister and mistress, I
+micht have gotten into grief wi’ them for bringing sickness about the
+place. But Sir Jeames and my leddy were very considerate and kind. They
+had in Dr. Murray, and he fetched a nurse from the infirmary, since the
+sick man was ower bad to be removed, and we a’ feasted on denties from
+the big hoose. The sinner who had caused the trouble pu’d through, and
+noo he’s convalescent. But he’s as wake as water, and he hasna gotten
+his mind--what there was o’t--richt back. I thocht it micht divert him,
+and the doctor said there was nae harm, to tak’ him for a sail. It was
+the least thing Bawby Sed could do to look after him. Moreover, she’s
+aye ready for the road; so if you please, sir, they’re sitting on the
+sheltered side of the vessel, and if you’ve ony skill in complaints,
+you’ll maybe step ower and gie’s your opinion.’
+
+Tam had no skill, but he had also no shrinking from the sight of
+disease, while his refusal might sound, to Sandy, like a cowardly
+shunning of danger, which the man himself had apparently faced with
+intrepidity.
+
+The young man began to thread his way with the burly Highlander across
+the crowded deck. In the middle of the process Tam was surprised by the
+statement from Sandy: ‘I did not think of it when you spoke to me first,
+Maister Drysdale, but I’ve just called to mind that Rory--that’s the
+object’s name--has some notion in his licht head, with which the
+gentleman your faither has to do.’
+
+‘I do not think my father has ever had much to do with Highlanders out
+of Glasgow,’ said Tam incredulously. ‘He has been in the Highlands, of
+course, but he has led too busy a life in Glasgow and at Drysdale Haugh
+to have had time to make many acquaintances elsewhere.’
+
+‘Very like, sir; only the first time I saw the felly he was speerin’ at
+Bawby Sed about Drysdale Haugh. He coupled it with the Mackinnons that
+were there before your time, but he allowed there was a Drysdale in the
+matter. One of his reasons for takin’ the place of dug-laddie at Semple
+Barns, and coming out with me, was that we were cheek by jowl wi’
+Drysdale Haugh. All through his illness he yammered [murmured] about
+Drysdales and Mackinnons and the gentleman that cam’ to the island for
+the shooting, and the charge he left with ane Morag of the Bothie. If
+Rory has not been aff his head from first to last, it was maist
+unfortunate that he did not get word of Captain Mackinnon, the young
+maister’s frien’, while he was staying out at our place for a couple of
+weeks. A meeting micht have let the cat oot of the poke [bag]--always
+supposing there is a cat in the poke, and it is not a craze
+altogether--with which it would be a thoosand pities to fash ony
+gentleman. But then, Rory was at the hicht of the fivver, not fit to be
+spoken wi’. ‘Deed he’s not fit yet, when it comes to that--but yonder he
+is, tied to Bawby Sed’s apron-string.’
+
+Poor Rory of the Shelties had never been much to look at, but now, with
+the ghastliness of his late illness still blanching his freckled skin,
+and pinching his long chin, with his short tartan coat hanging loose on
+his shoulder-blades as if they were two pegs, so that he had double need
+of the plaid in which he was wrapped, he looked a miserable wreck. Mind
+as well as body seemed gone, as he sat sunk in his corner, and kept
+feebly tapping the lid of a snuff-mull which somebody had put into his
+hand.
+
+Mrs. Seth sprang up the moment she caught a glimpse of Sandy’s waving
+tartan. ‘Tak’ a turn wi’ him yersel’, Sandy Macnab,’ she enjoined her
+friend, ‘while I rax [stretch] my banes and see if there’s onybody I ken
+on board. He’s dreich [dull] company, I’m not sure the braw sail is
+worth it. For you, Sandy, you’re like a recruiting sergeant in the auld
+Forty Twa.’ With this propitiatory compliment Mrs. Seth hastily
+withdrew, lest her purpose should be anticipated.
+
+‘Hoo are ye noo, Rory?’ his patron Sandy addressed the sick man, in the
+condescending coaxing accents with which he might have spoken to a
+child. ‘Dinna ye find the wind and the water refreshing?’
+
+‘They mak’ me dizzy,’ said Rory peevishly.
+
+‘Oo! that will wear off,’ said Sandy confidently, ‘and you’ll be as
+strong as a powny in no time. Wha do you think I’ve brocht to see you?
+Young Maister Drysdale, of Drysdale Hall and Drysdale Haugh,’ speaking
+with elaborate distinctness. ‘Div ye hear, Rory?’
+
+‘I’m no deaf, I have the hearing,’ said the invalid, still as ‘fractious
+as a child,’ but raising himself slightly while he spoke, and fumbling
+with his claw-like hand on the seat near him, a gleam of cunning purpose
+coming into his lacklustre eyes. ‘It is Mackinnon of Drysdale Haugh,’ he
+muttered.
+
+‘There he is at his havers [nonsense] again,’ protested Sandy
+unceremoniously.
+
+‘I’m afraid my father is all there is to stand for the owner of Drysdale
+Haugh,’ said young Tam. ‘Have you any claim on the place? Had you
+anything to do with the Mackinnons? When you are better, if you will
+come to my father he will see to it.’
+
+But Rory was not listening to the assurance; he was occupied with
+another source of excitement. His hands were groping convulsively around
+him. ‘What have you done with my boxie, Sandy Macnab?’ he asked,
+quivering with passion and distress. ‘It is my kistie I want, and if
+you’ve stealt it, I’ll have you up before the first justice I can find.’
+
+‘The impidence and ingratitude of the wretch!’ exclaimed Sandy, not
+discomposing himself, though the scene began to attract attention, to
+Tam’s annoyance. ‘To think that I would touch his dirty papers!’
+betraying by the very terms of the protest that his curiosity had got
+the better of him.
+
+Then as Rory’s rage subsided into a weak wail, while the lamentable
+figure rocked backwards and forwards as if it had been that of a woman,
+compassion replaced wrath in the easy, genial nature of the dog-man.
+‘Losh, man, your bit boxie’s safe in the press in your room! Would you
+gang lugging an auld soldier’s kit with you when you’re taking a
+pleasure-sail for your health in the company of friends? You’re to have
+everything you want at my expense--that is, at Sir Jeames’s. Here,
+drink a drappie from my flask to put heart into you, and set your mind
+at rest about your boxie.’
+
+Rory made no objection to swallowing the whisky, nor stopped to
+ascertain whether it was administered by a traitor or a true man, an
+arrant thief or the most honest of his kind. The draught was potent in
+his present state; in a few moments he was fast asleep, and likely to
+remain so for some time, while his outraged keeper called anew for the
+services of the truant ‘Bawby Sed,’ to ‘hap [wrap] up’ her patient, and
+keep him in her eye, lest he should ‘loup ower the side of the steamer
+and become fude for fishes’ in the storm he was making about his boxie,
+though it was as like as not that he would forget all about it when he
+awoke. ‘It is his bodily wakeness that mak’s him doubly wake in his
+mind,’ Sandy explained to all interested. ‘The doctor says when he gets
+strong again he may be all the man he ever was, which is not saying
+muckle. I wuss I had never meddled wi’ the wull-cat.’
+
+‘Hout! twa Jock Hielantmen should match are anither,’ jeered a listener.
+
+‘I would like to ken wha you’re calling Jock Hielantmen? You’ll better
+mind your manners,’ Sandy suddenly fired up, and spluttered haughtily.
+
+Young Tam strolled away, not much exhilarated by the incident, and not
+troubling to puzzle out the wandering fancy--to which he attached no
+importance--of a half-witted Highland beggar, as Rory appeared to him.
+
+The steamboat reached the pier in Rothesay Bay, and its company streamed
+out pell-mell, without spending more than a glance on the semicircle of
+mountains that closed in a lovely scene. Somehow the disregard of it
+jarred upon Tam, accompanied as it was by the unvarnished utterance of
+the popular impression with regard to a little island containing a
+single house, firmly believed to exist somewhere in the neighbourhood.
+‘Ay, it is a funny place, if ye kenned a’, and could get a glimpse o’t,’
+a man who was looking earnestly about for the object in question told a
+neighbour. ‘It’s the Drucken Island, where the rich leddies that forget
+theirsel’s are shipped aff by their men. But they say the leddies have
+stealed the key o’ the boathouse, and rowed to the shore, and gotten
+what they wanted, in spite of the doctor and their keepers, afore now.’
+
+‘Eh! what a drouth [thirst] they maun hae had to risk their lives to
+slocken [quench] it!’ exclaimed a woman in the vicinity.
+
+‘Lass,’ said a grave companion, ‘they risked and lost mair than their
+lives afore they ever came there, God help them!’
+
+The sail was over, and it was who should get first on shore and make the
+most of the land entertainment. A few of the passengers started for
+Ascog, with its fuschia hedges, the vitrified fort, or the walk to
+Kingarth, that would take the pedestrians past the fine pleasure-grounds
+of Mount Stuart. A considerable number had friends in the island, and
+desired to look them up and claim their hospitality. But the great
+proportion of the holiday-makers went no farther than the seaside and
+the green braes, congregating there like ants, occupying every seat and
+public walk which the inhabitants of the place had for the time
+forsaken. There were bathing and wading under difficulties, a great deal
+of tolerably reckless boating, homely picknicking to an enormous extent,
+and much simple lounging and ‘lazing,’ as well as abundant horse-play.
+‘’Arriet and ’Arry,’ represented by Murdoch and Maggie, not only flirted
+‘through wind and wet,’ they exhibited their love by showering salt
+water on each other, and pelting each other with sea sand. There were
+frequent resorts to the nearest ale-houses, which became in the end
+choke-full.
+
+Young Tam, through all the baffling, disappointed consciousness of a
+wasted day, continued doggedly determined to see the holiday to the end.
+He would not allow himself the respite of a visit to a good hotel and a
+quiet dinner eaten in welcome retirement. He strode into one of the
+humbler inns, sharing in the hubbub, took his chance of the knives and
+forks, and partook of the pies and ale which were the most solid
+refreshment of the fellow holiday-makers who refused to own him as a
+fellow. He loitered wistfully among them to the last moment, running
+with the multitude at the false alarm of a drowned man who was fished
+out of the water and resuscitated before it was too late, and a lost
+child that was found sitting chattering on a policeman’s knee. He saw
+the last of his umbrella in bestowing it on a young couple bent on
+walking out of earshot of their companions, and being drenched to the
+skin in one of the sudden down-pours of the latitude--the pair never
+stopping to thank him for the sacrifice.
+
+Tam re-embarked manfully with his steamboat load, cleared out just in
+time before the arrival of another consignment of the same kind,
+flooding Rothesay at sundown with a fresh crowd of riotous strangers,
+for whom there was neither sleeping accommodation nor return to Glasgow
+that night. If the weather were fine, they would lie about, like
+unpicturesque northern lazzaroni, on door-steps, under sheds, against
+hay-stacks, on the bare hillsides. If the night set in soaking
+wet--instances had been known of an Icelandic experience--the churches
+would be thrown open to the dripping, shivering troops of men, women,
+and children by humane people in authority, who did not find it
+inconsistent with their religion to discover that churches were made
+for men, and not men for churches.
+
+In young Tam’s steamer the scum came more and more to the surface.
+Silenus and his crew prevailed over decent working men and women, who
+took refuge in effacing themselves and cautiously withdrawing into
+obscurity. The crowded decks presented an orgie, kept up to a maddening
+refrain, given forth by hundreds of singing, shouting, and swearing men,
+bawling women, and crying children. It seemed next to a miracle that the
+sailors could preserve the faintest remnant of discipline, escape the
+demoralizing influences around, and continue to manage the ship so as to
+prevent any hideous accident.
+
+The night wind blew cold, even on a summer evening, the humid climate,
+which forms an excuse for the frequent resort to the hot wine--the
+barley-bree of the country--relieved itself by the frequent discharge of
+pelting showers. The wistfully smiling side of the weather was gone,
+and only the sulks and tears were left. The shores of the river grew
+dark and disconsolate. The very river--blue, like the Rhone in some of
+its more favourable aspects--was now a muddy grey, suggestive of much
+dirt, which the dredging machines were insufficient to clear away.
+
+Every voyager, except those past feeling, grew chilly and weary. The
+women drew the skirts of their gowns over the wearers’ shoulders and
+heads to afford them shelter and to protect finery, of which the
+feathers were draggled, and the artificial roses drooping. The men
+buttoned up their coats, turned up the collars, and smoked heavily. The
+children experienced the consequences of a slight swell on the water and
+a day’s surfeit.
+
+There was a desperate determination to dance impossible dances, and as
+much promiscuous embracing as if men were living in the days of the
+great French Revolution, and vowing eternal liberty, equality, and
+fraternity.
+
+At last more than one free fight arose, in which Tam, with his broad
+shoulders, clear head, and indignant heart, felt bound to interfere.
+Like the grand, inspired legislator--the friend of his people in their
+slavery--Tam, too, would have said, ‘Wherefore smitest thou thy fellow?’
+and would have received the refusal, with reason here, to acknowledge
+him as a ruler and judge. ‘The redder’s lick’ was ready for him, as for
+his neighbours. Several men who had broken all bounds in their drunk
+frenzy turned upon him--‘What are you doing here, young Drysdale, spying
+ferlies [wonders]? We want nane o’ your countenance. Auld Tam is worth a
+dizzen o’ you; but we dinna want him nayther, nooadays. Mind your ain
+bizness; it’s for nae gude ye’re skulking here in oor boat. Is’t oor
+lasses you’re seekin’?--gentlemen like you can try these tricks--or a
+handle to haud over our heads if we get into a scrape, or a sham of
+teaching us to behave like gentlemen? But you’re no a generation out o’
+the dirt yoursel’--for a’ your faither’s braw hoose and your mither’s
+fine carriage. Tak’ you care, young Tam Drysdale, or we’ll gie you a
+dook [dip] in the water for your pains.’
+
+Tam was surrounded and borne away by some of the sober men in his
+vicinity. One of them knew him sufficiently, and had enough interest in
+him, to remonstrate:
+
+‘What made you come with us the day, sir? It was a fule’s errand. It
+would have been all very weel if it had been a maister’s treat, in which
+the maister still keeps the upper hand. But the Fair-days are like the
+daft-days at the New Year, they are an exception to a’ ithers. They
+belong mair to the riff-raff than to ony ither portion o’ the community.
+I’ve half made up my mind to stay at hame and shut mysel’ in the hoose
+with the gudewife and the weans another year; leastways, though Granny
+at Rothesay be disappointed, I’ll not jine ony o’ the shoals on the
+water. I question whether Norman himsel’ could have quieted them at sic
+a time.’
+
+Then Tam remembered there was one ostensible working-day in the year
+when even his father did not venture to the works or the office. For on
+the 1st of January (old style) these brethren of labour--descendants of
+an old severely religious people--the Whigs of the West, having begun
+the year with their first-footing and their exchange of bottles on every
+side, were ‘roaring fou,’ almost to a man, for the space of twelve
+hours--the quietest individual in ordinary circumstances being often the
+most madly hilarious or brutally violent on these privileged occasions.
+‘Ca’ canny till they settle down again,’ had been auld Tam’s wary
+advice. ‘Puir chiels, they have not sae mony break-oots, and there will
+be sair heads and shamed faces among them the morn.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE PLEASURES OF THE RICH.
+
+
+Auld Tam and Mrs. Drysdale went a good deal into company like
+themselves--rich millowners with whom Tam had large connection in
+business, and the heads of some of the most flourishing trades in
+Glasgow, who had become, in one way or another, acquainted with the
+wealthy dyer and calico-printer, and who had often the common ground
+with him that they too had risen from the ranks. There is a spell in
+money, as in many potent things, which draws the possessors into an
+alliance--offensive and defensive.
+
+It would be hard to sum up the thousands represented by Tam Drysdale’s
+acquaintances. Though he had not forgotten his poorer friends, and did
+them many a good turn, he had a genuine respect for money, or rather for
+the qualities concerned in its acquisition. He made excuses for the rich
+man no less than for the poor. ‘He’s made a grand job o’ that mill, or
+that pit,’ he would say. ‘They cry he’s near-handed, or he’s fond o’ the
+bottle, or he’s grown an imperious dug in his age. But what would you
+have? Think of what he’s been and dune! Money has its temptations. Them
+that have spared in their youth may be led into stinting still in their
+riper years, or they may be beguiled into menselessness, as it were, to
+make up for the past. If men commence to scrape and boo at your biddin’,
+it’s no aye easy to refrain from walking over their necks. More by
+token, a man that has made and keepit riches has as frequently as not
+shown his superiority--that he has the brains, the smeddum [spirit],
+the self-restraint, and the energy that render men fit to rule.’ Tam put
+a prosperous man’s high value on prosperity, while with his feeling for
+adversity there mingled, in spite of his kindness of heart, a shade of
+impatient scorn.
+
+Mrs. Drysdale had also her estimate of her friends--those richly clad,
+frequently overgrown as well as overweighted women, who for the most
+part formed her circle, affected by the texture of their satins and
+velvets, and the contents of their jewel-boxes. She did not apply the
+same test to Lady Semple, for even Eppie’s simple judgment was quick
+enough to discern that her ladyship, who had a habit of wearing shabby
+silk gowns without ornament, belonged to a different class and must be
+measured by another rule.
+
+The visiting consisted largely of dinners conducted with the greatest
+formality. The great points at those dinners were the costliness of the
+table equipage and the expense and unseasonableness, rather than
+seasonableness, of the viands. So much silver glittered on those
+mercantile tables that it began to be a drug and little thought of, as
+the metal was at Jerusalem in the days of King Solomon. There was a talk
+of silver-gilt, even of a sprinkling of gold vessels, to create a
+sensation. The givers of the feast were still dead to the merits of
+rock-crystal, else there would have been an opening for it. Salmon, the
+first day the Act of Parliament permitted the rivers to be drawn; lamb
+when the frost-bitten grass was still sprinkled with snow, peas and
+strawberries, not half-withered importations from the shores of the
+Mediterranean, and yet not brought to maturity before the month of May
+by an unaided Scotch sun; the earliest oysters, grouse and venison.
+
+Tam and Mrs. Drysdale viewed those feasts--not necessarily of
+reason--with the greatest respect, and dressed in the man and woman’s
+best to do the entertainments honour. The husband and wife took their
+station as host and hostess in the Drysdale Hall drawing-room, or drove
+off as guests in the Drysdale Hall carriage, with something like
+solemnity, as for an imposing rite. Notwithstanding their laudable
+endeavours to grace the scene, neither looked half so well as in his or
+her ordinary attire. There was a specially clownish air about Tam in his
+fine broadcloth and fine linen. Mrs. Drysdale suffered more than ever
+from the disadvantage of being ‘braw’ in her richest velvet and most
+delicate lace. It was to little purpose that he wore on one of his
+little fingers a sapphire fit to be an heirloom, or that her bracelet,
+brooch, and ear-rings far outshone that broken diamond necklace, found
+after a fire among the ruins of Shawfield House, of which there is still
+an old Glasgow tradition.
+
+But the excellent couple were not singular. Their fellow guests were,
+to use a Scotch phrase, ‘as fine as they could hing,’ rejoicing in the
+costliest materials and the most expensive of tailors and _modistes_ to
+furnish the toilette. Dockens were wagging with a vengeance. The result
+was not cheering when the personal comeliness which distinguished the
+Drysdales was wanting. It was positively depressing. Nobody seemed quite
+at home in his or her clothes. They were not as if they had grown upon
+the wearers’ backs--which is the perfection of dressing, and the women
+had the expression of thinking of nothing else but their wardrobes and
+those of their neighbours displayed for the general benefit.
+
+Young Tam and Claribel were only occasionally present at these dinners.
+St. Mungo’s city drew a hard and fast line between the old and the young
+in these matters. The visiting of the latter included the staying for
+two or three days at a time at a friend’s house where there were young
+people like themselves (the seniors rarely paid a visit which lasted
+over a night), balls, public and private, junior clubs, the theatre, the
+hunting-field, and all picnics that were not purely family affairs. But
+the solid dinners lay in the province of the elders, and formed their
+dissipation.
+
+If an exception was made it was in young Tam’s favour, for his benefit
+or loss. His sex and the probability of his entering into his father’s
+business entitled him to greater consideration than any girl, however
+handsome or well-dressed or otherwise mistress of the situation. He was
+fitter company for the elderly men, since Young Glasgow can generally
+talk business with as much zest as his father can talk it--nay,
+sometimes with a glitter of the eye under the smooth forehead and hair
+the hue of the raven or the squirrel, which hints at an increase of the
+gambling spirit in the population.
+
+As for Claribel, though she knew what she was about, and could suit Lady
+Semple, who found her a most useful and obliging young friend, Clary had
+very little to say on the stock themes of servants and tradespeople to
+matrons of her mother’s type. It was to this level that Mrs. Drysdale’s
+conversation fell in society; though when she was alone with her
+daughter Eppie, she could tell charming tales, idyls of old country and
+town life, embellished by queer figures and quaint customs--Egg Jean,
+Bell Geordie and Creepy Kate; Milky May-day, and Hallowe’en with its
+nuts and apples.
+
+But from the time that Tam and Mrs. Drysdale started, sitting side by
+side like a pair of wedded doves, he with a glove in one hand and she
+with her laced pocket-handkerchief in her lap, talking with bated breath
+of the richest and greatest persons they expected to meet, they were
+‘upon their manners,’ she naturally more subdued than he, but both
+considerably impressed. Solemnly Tam stepped from the carriage at their
+destination and handed Mrs. Drysdale out under the awning put up to
+shelter them from the elements. Arm in arm, in spite of modern usage,
+the two were passed from one officiating domestic to another, in the
+line of servants stationed in the hall, on the staircase, in the
+corridor, a tolerably numerous band, when, according to the way in St.
+Mungo’s city, Tam tipped each servant, crossing every palm with silver
+as he passed its bowing owner.
+
+At last came the stentorian announcement, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Drysdale;’ and
+the door was flung open to reveal another pair, generally portlier and
+as well clad, standing in the centre of another gorgeous drawing-room,
+with a stream of black coats, gold chains, white ties, velvet and moire,
+flashing stones and choice bouquets, circling or subsiding into a
+stationary ring round the central couple.
+
+The dinner itself was a very serious, not to say ponderous, business, in
+which each eater not only dwelt on the merits of soup and entrées, but
+appraised the madeira which had travelled round the world, and the
+home-raised pines. The circumstances did not admit of much talking,
+unless in a word or two to next neighbours. It was only when the
+pheasant made its exit, and the port and the cheese took its place, that
+the sense of responsibility was lessened, and a strain of
+good-fellowship, always increasing in joviality, began to prevail.
+
+The tongues of the men commenced to wag on politics, local interests,
+and when two of a trade met, ‘shop’ was not absent. There was no lack of
+shrewdness, broad common-sense, and fair intelligence, for these
+men--reckoning them from those who had made the humblest beginnings--had
+all received a fair parish-school education, and their acquirements had
+been enlarged and rubbed into the best condition by intercourse with
+the world, and the calculations and speculations of trade. There were
+college-bred men among them, and members of the old Glasgow houses--not
+stranded like that of Mackinnon, but borne on to this day on the full
+tide of prosperity. It was among the last that the best attributes of
+the born and bred diner-out showed themselves in a fund of appropriate
+anecdote--not coarse or worse--and in a peculiar humour not so much
+caustic as dry in its ripeness, like the champagne, sometimes with a
+dimly perceptible current of sadness in its mirth, as the best Scotch
+wit, unlike English wit or French wit or American wit, seems always to
+play on the wan face of
+
+    ‘The mighty waters sounding evermore.’
+
+The guests who thus contributed to the entertainment of the company were
+not entitled to complain that they were not in request, or were not the
+men whom their hosts and fellow-guests delighted to honour. Such men
+need never have sat at their own tables, and though they were often by
+no means the richest men present, their shadows never grew less, and
+they kept their own even in a money-making, money-respecting community.
+
+Young Tam could not for the life of him imagine what his father,
+especially, could see to like in such feasts. The young man was at war
+to the knife with all the luxury and parade. He hated to find his father
+and mother making part of them. They did and said more things to vex him
+then than at any other time, though they were not worse or nearly so bad
+as other people present. Tam and Mrs. Drysdale’s knowledge might be at
+fault, but their native modesty and kindly instincts--which forbade them
+to render themselves conspicuous or to offend anybody’s prejudices when
+the husband and wife were aware of them--were almost always to be
+trusted. If young Tam had been wiser he might have let his parents
+alone, and thought no more of them, with an easy mind.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Drysdale were not like the Nimmos, who had begun life with
+a small eating-house, and were now wholesale exporters of provisions to
+a vast extent; but though her apparel matched that of the best
+gentlewoman in the room, and she had a set of rubies without its equal
+in St. Mungo’s, she could never be allowed to have any other partner at
+table than one of her sons who was familiar with her little habits, and
+took the liberty of engrossing her conversation on the petawties and the
+piz, and that donnert deevil of a servant; and what for should she not
+pyke her teeth when a curran’ had got into ane of them? and she minded
+when a whole glass-fu’ of toothpicks was provided for the customers at
+the shop in the close. Her husband was not so objectionable, but he was
+the better of his daughter-in-law at his elbow. She was a sharp,
+determined little woman of better standing, and warned off the servants
+with the sherry and the liqueurs, under his very nose.
+
+No; young Tam was a prig and an ass if he imagined he had any real
+reason to blush for the authors of his being. He was bound rather to be
+thankful to them for more than the goodly heritage they had provided for
+him, at which he ‘cast laith,’ even for their manly and womanly
+courteous self-mastery. Still he would have been relieved if his father
+had not brought forward his Burgundy, and promised his host the next
+time he came to Drysdale Hall the taste of such a brand as was not to be
+found in Hamilton Palace, and his mother had not called macaroni
+‘mikeronis,’ and Charlotte à la Russe ‘Chaurlotte-ally-Rice.’ He did not
+care half so much when she cried out, ‘Keep me, the day!’ at the most
+exciting of Mr. Rowland’s stories, and his father was surprised into a
+guffaw that seemed to shake the table.
+
+Small faults to rankle in a mind that was not little. It was only sore
+in a transition phase, and raw in its youthfulness.
+
+Young Tam had not time and attention to spare for good stories. He felt
+angry with himself when he was forced to laugh. A set of old tomfools,
+he was tempted to style his companions. Life was earnest: he could not
+afford to waste it in such child’s play. He thought of the gross revelry
+of the Fair-days, he recalled the misery of times of strike and failures
+in cotton, and he wondered that men and women with souls to be saved
+could thus trifle with the signs of the times. He would not have exposed
+himself to the purgatory of these dinners, at which he sat in his goodly
+young manhood like a killjoy, had he not known that to refuse all such
+invitations would incense his father as much as anything he had yet
+done.
+
+It was not only by his father and mother’s satisfaction with these
+pompous gaieties that young Tam felt aggrieved; he was still more
+exasperated with Athole Murray’s barefaced enjoyment of the ridiculous
+proceedings. There was an exception made for Athole sometimes, as for
+young Tam, in putting her name on the dinner-lists. Her father was
+frequently one of the guests, for two reasons. First, he was an old and
+respected native of the locality; in the second place, when he was in
+the mood, he was one of the most accomplished story-tellers of the
+circle, one of the most learned in the curious records of the great city
+of which all her citizens are proud. His comparative poverty was thus
+condoned, and he was welcomed to rich men’s tables, at which he did not
+refuse to sit because he was not himself rich.
+
+Dr. Peter had boasted that he had friends among the wealthy as well as
+the poor. He did not grudge the former a farthing of their hundreds of
+thousands. He could make as much allowance for their temptations as one
+of the men themselves--Tam Drysdale--could do. It pleased Dr. Peter to
+exercise his faculty on their behalf. They were worthy fellows, many of
+them, he maintained, and few knew, as he was in circumstances to know,
+the good they did, not only by their public works, but by their private
+charities. If he could contribute to their entertainment--they were not
+always easy to entertain, as they were not particularly entertaining in
+a mixed company--that was their weak point; if he could help them to a
+right good laugh, he should always think it a privilege and a compliment
+to himself to play his part.
+
+It was awkward to invite Dr. Murray to a party which included ladies,
+and exclude Athole, his solitary specimen of womankind. As the mistress
+of her father’s household, she had something of the brevet rank of a
+matron; therefore she appeared occasionally, like young Tam, at the
+elderly people’s dinners. She had no individual taste for heavy,
+prolonged meals, and there was sometimes not another young person
+present to keep her in company except the young Turk from Drysdale Hall.
+Athole was at ease and contented in her home-life, but she did not
+despise a change. She thought it good for her father. She liked to see
+him among his contemporaries, and she had a cordial esteem for some of
+them, not altogether derived from him.
+
+The girl was an exceedingly simple figure among the magnificent dames.
+It would have been absurd in her to try to cope with them, or even with
+the daughters--when there were daughters--of the houses where the
+entertainments took place. For the husbands’ or fathers’ incomes far
+more than outnumbered in thousands what her father could claim in
+hundreds. Athole’s silk gown was not as thick as leather, according to a
+definition which she had heard some of the favoured matrons apply to
+their silks. It was generally supplemented by some gauzy material with
+which she rang changes. She hoped her single state and her twenty and
+odd years carried off her failure in the virtues of the Worth School, on
+which not only newspaper paragraphs, magazines of fashion, and novels by
+benighted female hands, but novels concocted under male auspices,
+insist, with a sort of man-milliner gusto distressing to realize. If her
+supposed probation did not justify what fine ladies might call her
+shabbiness--what then? It did not signify. Athole laughed at the idea,
+and her thin, dark face and brilliant eyes looked more bizarre and
+expressive than ever. A ‘shilpet, blecket, poorly got-up lassie,’ many
+of the ladies called her, with disdainful pity. Yet their husbands were
+fond of talking to the Cinderella who had not yet met her fairy
+godmother.
+
+And, after all, this Cinderella’s rags were no rags, and by no means
+without womanly and artistic taste in their disposal; only they were not
+rich and rare like the approved garments of the day. Athole knew very
+well, under her philosophy, what became her, and used to say that though
+she were as rich as Crœsus, she did not think she would adopt costly
+array. In addition to the consideration she professed for her maid
+Jeannie, to whom Athole was a law in dress--who, like many hand-maidens,
+copied her mistress at a humble distance--Athole was satisfied satin and
+velvet and the cunning devices of the most ingenious and extravagant of
+dress-makers did not suit her style as they suited Claribel Drysdale’s
+outward woman. Athole was plain, and simplicity did best with plainness.
+She did not wish to look like a fantastic Frenchwoman.
+
+Besides being set apart for each other when they were the only young
+people at these dinners, there were mingled attraction and repulsion
+between Athole Murray and young Tam Drysdale. She knew that he was
+affronted by her levity in relishing these feasts, and it tickled her
+that he should be so affronted. He knew that she did not believe in his
+modified Communism, and looked upon it as a particular kind of juvenile
+disease--not so common as the measles, but occasionally to be seen even
+in the sons of rich men. He was aware that she laughed at him, and he
+was piqued by her laughter--piqued to bring her to a juster frame of
+mind by proving his sincerity. When he meditated anything
+desperate--resigning his birthright, going to Australia, turning out to
+work for his own hand at any work for which he was qualified--he always
+took into account how Athole Murray would look and what she would say;
+if she would believe in him then, and if she would be sorry for having
+mistaken him.
+
+‘I hope you are enjoying yourself, Miss Murray,’ said young Tam
+frigidly, on one of these occasions. His tone sounded as if his hope
+partook more of the nature of a fear. He was standing before her, after
+the gentlemen had joined the ladies in the drawing-room. Athole was
+sitting on a couch, near a knot of gentlemen who occupied the hearthrug
+with cups of tea in their hands, and a _raconteur_ improving the moment
+till the whist-tables should be set out. A chorus of laughter testified
+to the capabilities of success on the part of the narrator.
+
+‘Thanks, exceedingly,’ answered Athole, suddenly brightening her whole
+appearance by the expansion of a curious little scarlet fan which she
+held in her hand. ‘But don’t let me miss Mr. Rowland’s next story--he is
+in great force to-night.’
+
+‘I wonder you can be entertained by stale Joe Millers.’
+
+‘But as I am entertained, and as he is just going to tell a story which
+always makes me laugh, though I have heard it a hundred times, please
+don’t talk just now. Perhaps it is not so familiar to you; if so, you
+cannot guess what a treat it will be.’
+
+She stopped, and set herself to listen, and he was compelled to follow
+her example. Mr. Rowland was retailing the strait of a Highland
+dancing-master, whose steps were unassailable, but whose music was
+confined to his voice, with which he sang, to improvised appropriate
+words, the tunes of the strathspeys and reels through which he was
+assiduously marshalling his pupils. Mr. Rowland gave examples, humming
+the doggerel in alternately slow and fast time, with his comical cracked
+voice, in keeping with the comical jiggy airs:
+
+    ‘Now, Jock, for sure and certain,
+     Come tiddle and come tartan,
+     You’ll dance with Betty Martin,
+       She’s a pridefu’ little queen.’
+
+    ‘And you there, White Breeks, White Breeks,
+     Set you to Red Cheeks, Red Cheeks,
+       Or you’re no worth a preen.’
+
+‘Mr. Tam,’ said Athole behind her fan, ‘have you forsworn laughter? Have
+you taken the pledge in that direction? Oh, I should not like to be
+Clary and Eppie! Now hear my story. There was once a very great lady
+listening to the reading of a very small book. The hapless author--a
+misled young woman--mutual friends supposed, mistakenly of course, might
+profit by the great lady’s patronage. “Oh!” she said, with a shudder at
+a certain point in the tale, “whatever she’s going to do, I hope she’s
+not going to be funny.”’
+
+Young Tam was driven to smile, and at the unusual sight auld Tam, whose
+eyes were resting on the couple, experienced a second twinge of doubt
+regarding them. Young Tam could not be so depraved in taste as to be
+making up to that insignificant, nearly ugly, lassie of Dr. Peter’s,
+with all the beauties and all the fortunes in Glasgow awaiting his
+choice. The next moment Dr. Peter Murray walked up to his daughter and
+young Tam. Auld Tam took heart of grace, and made a fourth in the group.
+
+‘By-the-bye, do you know anything of a Highland tramp who has been down
+with fever in the servants’ offices at Semple Barns?’ young Tam was
+asking the doctor. ‘I met him with Macnab, Sir James’s dog-man, in the
+Rothesay boat, on one of the Fair-days. The Highlander had come to
+Glasgow, as I understood his countryman to say, full of some talk about
+Drysdale Haugh, and the Mackinnons and Drysdales, as if he had business
+with one or the other. But his wits, if he ever had any, were far to
+seek when I saw him. The poor, miserable fellow seemed at the last gasp;
+indeed, I should not wonder if he were not alive.’
+
+‘I never heard of such a person,’ interposed auld Tam in surprise.
+‘I’ve had little troke [traffic] with the Highlands, and the queer thing
+is how this mon should ken of Drysdale Haugh--that is, if he is not a
+Glasgy Highlander, born and bred within a hunder yards of the
+Gallowgate. I am not so full of conceit as to fancy the fame of my works
+has crossed the lochs, and floated as far awa’ as Skye, or John o’
+Groat’s.’
+
+‘I attended the man,’ said Dr. Peter, ‘and I can bear witness that he
+had heard of you or somebody of the same name, and of your works, and
+that they had belonged to a Mackinnon. I was curious to know if his
+acquaintance extended to the Murrays, but I could never find that he
+paid us that compliment in his delirium. He’s not dead, but he’s as bad.
+His mind became affected to such a degree, and he grew so unmanageable,
+that I had to apply to have him lodged as a pauper in the asylum. He may
+recover his judgment, or he may not. I thought, to begin with, it was
+simply bodily and mental weakness, following on the fever in a bad
+subject, and that when the first was better the second would mend in a
+measure. But I can no longer pronounce on the case.’
+
+‘I hope the poor sinner was not an impostor trying to get up a begging
+story, and turn a penny on some scrap of information he had picked up,’
+suggested auld Tam. ‘You mind Mackinnon went to the Hielands for sport
+every season; but, preserve us, he’s been dead for mair than twenty
+years!’
+
+‘And this man--a shauchled [ill knit] half-natural at best, broken down
+by hardship and poor living--is not above thirty or thirty-five, judging
+of him professionally. He was never likely to trump up a story to much
+purpose, and now he is _hors de combat_ either in the business of
+imposition or in any other. That word “business” is sometimes oddly
+applied. Have you heard what Inglis, our oldest elder, said to that
+new-fangled chap Cairns, who has come into the session, and is fain to
+put the other elders through their facings in the discharge of their
+duties? “Muster Cairns, I have been an elder for thirty years, and I
+know my buzness!”’
+
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+                 BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
+
+
+
+
+                 THREE-VOLUME NOVELS AT ALL LIBRARIES.
+
+          =PRINCESS NAPRAXINE.= By OUIDA.
+
+          =DOROTHY FORSTER.= By WALTER BESANT.
+
+          =SAINT MUNGO’S CITY.= By SARAH TYTLER.
+
+          =A DRAWN GAME.= By BASIL.
+
+          =HEART SALVAGE BY SEA AND LAND.= By MRS. COOPER (KATHERINE SAUNDERS).
+
+          =THE NEW ABELARD.= By ROBERT BUCHANAN.
+
+          =A REAL QUEEN.= By R. E. FRANCILLON.
+
+          =FANCY-FREE.= By CHARLES GIBBON.
+
+          =THE WAY OF THE WORLD.= By DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY.
+
+                  LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79371 ***